I will interpret this question a bit freely:

There is a long history of humans performing computational tasks (not mathematics) as a profession, and the technical tools and tables they had.

The Computer History Museum has among many other things some nice pictures of mechannical devices used to that end online, see in particular http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/calculators/1

The Barlow's tables mentioned in the text can be found in digital form here http://archive.org/details/barlowstablesofs00barlrich And, the LOCOMAT project collects together numerous digitized version of historical math tables and related info, see in particular http://locomat.loria.fr/locomat/digital-tables.html where also a link Crelle's tables (also mentioned) is to be found (year is 1820, to make it easier to find).

There is also a recent book When Computer Were Human by D.A. Grier on the people doing this and with the same title one can find a video taped talk online (on youtube for instance). [Disclaimer: I did not watch the video and have no detailed knwoledge on the content of the book, but it clearly seems relevant.]

ps: the justification for interpreting this so freely is that I think the question for some desks at the Univerity of Edinburgh is 'too localized' as long as there is no clear evidence they are in any sense special or of historical significance.

I will interpret this question a bit freely:

There is a long history of humans performing computational tasks (not mathematics) as a profession, and the technical tools and tables they had.

The Computer History Museum has among many other things some nice pictures of mechannical devices used to that end online, see in particular http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/calculators/1

The Barlow's tables mentioned in the text can be found in digital form here http://archive.org/details/barlowstablesofs00barlrich And, the LOCOMAT project collects together numerous digitized version of historical math tables and related info, see in particular http://locomat.loria.fr/locomat/digital-tables.html where also a link Crelle's tables (also mentioned) is to be found (year is 1820, to make it easier to find).

There is also a recent book When Computers Were Human by D.A. Grier on the people doing this and with the same title one can find a video taped talk online (on youtube for instance). [Disclaimer: I did not watch the video and have no detailed knwoledge on the content of the book, but it clearly seems relevant.]

ps: the justification for interpreting this so freely is that I think the question for some desks at the Univerity of Edinburgh is 'too localized' as long as there is no clear evidence they are in any sense special or of historical significance.

I will interpret this question a bit freely:

There is a long history of humans performing computational tasks (not mathematics) as a profession, and the technical tools and tables they had.

The Computer History Museum has among many other things some nice pictures of mechannical devices used to that end online, see in particular http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/calculators/1

There is also a recent book When Computer Were Human by D.A. Grier on the people doing this (starting quite a bit earlier than beginning of this century) and with the same title one can find a video taped talk online (on youtube for instance). [Disclaimer: I did not watch the video and have no detailed knwoledge on the content of the book, but it clearly seems relevant.]

ps: the justification for interpreting this so freely is that I think the question for some desks at the Univerity of Edinburgh is 'too localized' as long as there is no clear evidence they are in any sense special or of historical significance.

I will interpret this question a bit freely:

There is a long history of humans performing computational tasks (not mathematics) as a profession, and the technical tools and tables they had.

The Computer History Museum has among many other things some nice pictures of mechannical devices used to that end online, see in particular http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/calculators/1

The Barlow's tables mentioned in the text can be found in digital form here http://archive.org/details/barlowstablesofs00barlrich And, the LOCOMAT project collects together numerous digitized version of historical math tables and related info, see in particular http://locomat.loria.fr/locomat/digital-tables.html where also a link Crelle's tables (also mentioned) is to be found (year is 1820, to make it easier to find).

There is also a recent book When Computer Were Human by D.A. Grier on the people doing this and with the same title one can find a video taped talk online (on youtube for instance). [Disclaimer: I did not watch the video and have no detailed knwoledge on the content of the book, but it clearly seems relevant.]

ps: the justification for interpreting this so freely is that I think the question for some desks at the Univerity of Edinburgh is 'too localized' as long as there is no clear evidence they are in any sense special or of historical significance.