Era as large as a three-door wardrobe and it is considered the first electronic calculator installed in continental Europe. It was located at the Milan Polytechnic and was inaugurated on October 31, 1954.
The history of Crc 102A is the history of the dawn of Italian computer science. It was a valve computer, manufactured by the Computer Research Corporation. It was built in Hawthorne, California, with the collaboration of a professor from the Polytechnic who was the real architect of the operation: Luigi Dadda. He was 31 at the time: the previous year, he had been awarded a National Science Foundation scholarship that allowed him to do a research stint at CalTech in Los Angeles. Here he had seen the opportunities of new computer technologies and had convinced the rector of the Polytechnic, Gino Cassinis, to order (using funds from the Marshall Plan) a car that Dadda himself helped to realize.
Here the story becomes legendary: when the car was ready to go, an old ship was loaded, with the bales of cotton used to protect the delicate thermionic valves during navigation. When the ship arrived in the port of Genoa there was the problem of customs clearance and of paying the Radio Fee on each of the valves: it took all the tenacity and skill of Professor Dadda to get through customs without disassembling the car, which arrived in Milan in September 1954, housed in a basement room 2 South. The inauguration took place on October 31 and ever since Crc 102A was used “to solve linear algebraic equations facilitating the calculations necessary for the construction of major works, especially in the construction field and construction in general “.
For Professor Dadda that goal was only a springboard to continue his studies, which led him to become rector of the Polytechnic for a very long period, between 1972 and 1984. But his great merits as a scientist were really recognized only 4 years after his death, when the Ieef awarded him, posthumously, the “Milestone” award for the invention of the fast multiplier (recognition that before him they had only had three Italians, i.e. Alessandro Volta, Guglielmo Marconi and Enrico Fermi).
On the day of his death, October 26, 2012, Professor Alfonso Fuggetta wrote on his blog that “this morning our father passed away, the father of computer scientists and the ICT of the Politecnico di Milano “. Since 2019 his name has been added to the famedio of the monumental cemetery of Milan.
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