Contraves Cora

Short description: Digital fire-control system

Cora

Cora-1

Manufacturer| Contraves
Type| Fire-control system
Release date| late 1950s

The Cora was a digital fire-control system designed by Hungarian-Swiss Peter Tóth and produced by the Switzerland company Contraves.

## Development

Peter Tóth started the design of Cora-1 in 1957. The system was intended for anti-aircraft fire direction with the Swiss Army.[1] However, Cora-1 turned out to be too slow and too bulky for this application. It was programmed for other applications by programmers including Heinz Lienhard. One copy of the system was used at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) for cartography, and was put on display during Expo 64. The unit was rediscovered in storage in 2011, and is now on display at the Musée Bolo, in the Computer Science department of the EPFL.[1] Cora-1-was one of the first fully transistorized digital computers built in Switzerland according to the Von Neumann architecture.

An improved version of this computer was developed subsequently by a team led by Swiss engineer Peter Blum. Cora-2 was successfully used for anti-aircraft fire direction being compact enough to fit into the corresponding mobile control unit.

The Musée Bolo met with Peter Tóth and released several videos around his work on the Cora.[2][3]

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Un ordinateur historique retrouvé dans les caves de l’EPFL , 24 Heures
2. ↑ Musée Bolo (2018-02-26), Peter Toth tells the Cora's story, first commercial Swiss computer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBQyeSYICyw, retrieved 2019-03-04
3. ↑ Musée Bolo (2018-02-26), Peter Toth and the Cora 1, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbqL1xIKJcg&t=57s, retrieved 2019-03-04

## External links

* Discovery of Two Historical Computers in Switzerland: Zuse Machine M9 and Contraves Cora and Discovery of Unknown Documents on the Early History of Computing at the ETH Archives, Making the History of Computing Relevant , Springer 2013
* Schweizer Transistorrechner für militärische und zivile Zwecke, IT Magazine 2012/01

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