 SWAC. Williams tube memory is in center rear. | |
| Also known as | Standards Western Automatic Computer |
|---|---|
| Manufacturer | U.S. National Bureau of Standards (NBS) |
| Release date | 1950 |
| Units sold | 1 |
| Memory | 256 words, with each word being 37 bits (Williams tubes) |
The SWAC (Standards Western Automatic Computer) was an early electronic digital computer built in 1950 by the U.S. National Bureau of Standards (NBS) in Los Angeles, California. It was designed by Harry Huskey. [1] [ self-published source ]
Like the SEAC which was built about the same time, the SWAC was a small-scale interim computer designed to be built quickly and put into operation while the NBS waited for more powerful computers to be completed (in particular, the RAYDAC by Raytheon).
The machine used 2,300 vacuum tubes. It had 256 words of memory, using Williams tubes, with each word being 37 bits. It had only seven basic operations: add, subtract, and fixed-point multiply; [2] comparison, data extraction, input and output. Several years later, drum memory was added. [3]
When the SWAC was completed in August 1950, [4] it was the fastest computer in the world. It continued to hold that status until the IAS computer was completed a year later. It could add two numbers and store the result in 64 microseconds. A similar multiplication took 384 microseconds. It was used by the NBS until 1954 when the Los Angeles office was closed, and then by UCLA until 1967 (with modifications). It was charged out there for $40 per hour.
In January 1952, Raphael M. Robinson used the SWAC to discover five Mersenne primes—the largest prime numbers known at the time, with 157, 183, [5] 386, 664 and 687 digits.
Additionally, the SWAC was vital in doing the intense calculation required for the X-ray analysis of the structure of vitamin B12 done by Dorothy Hodgkin. [6] This was fundamental in Hodgkin receiving the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964.
EDVAC was one of the earliest electronic computers. It was built by Moore School of Electrical Engineering, Pennsylvania. Along with ORDVAC, it was a successor to the ENIAC. Unlike ENIAC, it was binary rather than decimal, and was designed to be a stored-program computer.
BINAC is an early electronic computer that was designed for Northrop Aircraft Company by the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC) in 1949. Eckert and Mauchly had started the design of EDVAC at the University of Pennsylvania, but chose to leave and start EMCC, the first computer company. BINAC was their first product, the first stored-program computer in the United States; BINAC is also sometimes claimed to be the world's first commercial digital computer even though it was limited in scope and never fully functional after delivery.
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The UNIVAC LARC, short for the Livermore Advanced Research Computer, is a mainframe computer designed to a requirement published by Edward Teller in order to run hydrodynamic simulations for nuclear weapon design. It was one of the earliest supercomputers.
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Abramowitz and Stegun (AS) is the informal name of a 1964 mathematical reference work edited by Milton Abramowitz and Irene Stegun of the United States National Bureau of Standards (NBS), now the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Its full title is Handbook of Mathematical Functions with Formulas, Graphs, and Mathematical Tables. A digital successor to the Handbook was released as the "Digital Library of Mathematical Functions" (DLMF) on 11 May 2010, along with a printed version, the NIST Handbook of Mathematical Functions, published by Cambridge University Press.
SEAC was a first-generation electronic computer, built in 1950 by the U.S. National Bureau of Standards (NBS) and was initially called the National Bureau of Standards Interim Computer, because it was a small-scale computer designed to be built quickly and put into operation while the NBS waited for more powerful computers to be completed. The team that developed SEAC was organized by Samuel N. Alexander. SEAC was demonstrated in April 1950 and was dedicated in June 1950; it is claimed to be the first fully operational stored-program electronic computer in the US.
Harry Douglas Huskey was an American computer design pioneer.
George Elmer Forsythe was an American computer scientist and numerical analyst who founded and led Stanford University's Computer Science Department.
The Joint Computer Conferences were a series of computer conferences in the United States held under various names between 1951 and 1987. The conferences were the venue for presentations and papers representing "cumulative work in the [computer] field."
Margaret R. Fox was an American electronics engineer and computer scientist. She was the Chief of the Office of Computer Information, part of the Institute for Computer Science and Technology of the National Bureau of Standards from 1966 to 1975 and was the first secretary of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies.
Samuel Nathan Alexander was an American computer pioneer who developed SEAC, one of the earliest computers.
Marvin Stein (1924-2015) was a mathematician and computer scientist, and the "father of computer science" at the University of Minnesota.
The Model V was among the early electromechanical general purpose computers, designed by George Stibitz and built by Bell Telephone Laboratories, operational in 1946.
SWAC, a fixed-point computer
