This is the complete original booklet that was available to 1951 Exhibition visitors — for the grand price of One Shilling and Sixpence.

It doubtless comes over as wordy and quaint to the present-day reader, but it seemed worth reproducing in its entirety, unedited. The original single text is split into two parts here -- simply for transcription convenience.

Part 1 will probably all be familiar stuff to modern readers. Part 2 gets more technical regarding the NIM algorithm, and how NIMROD performs it.

An effort has been made to correct all the OCR transcription errors, helped greatly by some extensive independent proofing by John Deane of the Australian Computer Museum Society. I think between us, we have by now pretty well caught them all! However, in the interests of historical accuracy, original misspellings have been left in place. (In particular: "Havard", and "the player who takes the last match... looses". ...And I thought that last one was born of the Internet...!)

 
It is trite to say that the scale of things changed markedly over that last half of the Twentieth Century, but then-and-now comparisons can be fun, The 'vast' memory size of the Mark I — a magnetic drum holding 32K of 20-bit 'lines' (words) in fact — makes for amusing reading. Execution speeds were less than 1000 instructions per second on those early number crunchers, so NIMROD, at one instruction per clock, and a maximum rate of 10kHz, did fairly well!

Some other things seem not to have changed so much over the years... The rate of obsolescence noted in the Introduction is strangely familiar!