Exchange of information, November 2003 to March 2004, between Joan Travis and John Gosling. The objective was to help John Gosling write up a technical entry for the Ferranti Mercury computer for the Computer Conservation Society’s "Our Computer Heritage" website. Included in the Mercury description was the code for a routine to compute the reciprocal of a number.
A mix of e-mail correspondence (print-outs), hand-written notes and photocopies of text extracted from other sources, all bound in a black A4 ring file. Besides information specific to Mercury’s hardware and software, the folder also contains: (a) a description of the OCH Pilot Study (December 2003); (b) text for a CCS bid to the Heritage Lottery Fund for financial support for the OCH project (July 2003); (c) copies of papers and web pages on mathematical methods (such as those based on Newton-Raphson) for computing the reciprocal of a number.