I've always loved hearing about our heritage as an industry. This article reminded me of when I made a pilgrimage to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View and saw a replica (working!) Babbage Engine amongst a bunch of ancient and obsoleted hardware. It's fascinating to see the progress we've made in only a few decades!
Can that rate of progress be sustained or is this a 'path dependence' sort of thing where niches get filled early on? I have no idea but would appreciate views
I'd imagine it would be sustained. Every year more and more money is poured into technology R&D as it becomes increasingly important. This helps match the difficulty of further development. Far in the future this may be an issue, but I doubt it will be an issue within the next decade.
In addition to the manual for the computer itself, describing the assembly language and so forth, these include documentation for the earliest versions of Fortran.
Bitsavers has a lot of neat stuff on all sorts of old computers, including other old IBM systems, the B5500, (recently mentioned here) and a whole lot of old DEC equipment.
