Hobnobbing with Harbaugh
The Office Monster
Computers
.This IBM physicist is working to reduce the cost of data processing even more – before some other company does.
Back in 1950, the cost of processing 35 thousand computer instructions was one dollar. Today, one dollar processes 35 million instructions.
What has driven the cost down? The work being done by IBM’s Dr. Sol Triebwasser and his associates may give us a clue.
.Micro Electronics.
The basis for continuing innovation.
From the leader…
TIs 990/9900 First Family.
Most cost-effective means of using microelectronics. To improve. To change. lb innovate for today and tomorrow Tl’s 990/9900 Family Software Compatibility from Components to Boards to Systems Not quite twenty years ago, the integrated circuit was born at Texas Instruments. And sparked a pervasive revolution that’s impacting all our lives.
.A Colorful Introduction to Computers
Here’s a fun and educational coloring book to introduce your home computer to the youngest members of your family. The Magic Machine explores the excitement and wonder of computers from a young child’s point of view.
The list of perfect numbers currently stands at 49 entries.
.Perfect Numbers
Six is such a number: it is the sum of all numbers that divide it except itself. In 2,000 years 12 perfect numbers were found; now a computer has discovered five more
by Constance Reid
THE GREEKS, greatly intrigued by the fact that the number 6 is the sum of all its divisors except itself (1+2 + 3), called it a “perfect” number. They wondered how many other such numbers there were. It was easy enough to ascertain by trial that the second perfect number was 28 (1+2 + 4 + 7+14). The great Euclid was able to prove that in all cases where a number can be factored into the form 2^n-l(2^n—1) and 2^n—1 is a prime number, the number must be the sum of all its divisors except itself.
.COMPUTERS: THEIR BUILT-IN LIMITATIONS
ARTICLE BY MAX GUNTHER “OH, MY GOD” croaked a network-TV director in New York. He seemed to be strangling in his turtle-neck shirt. It was the evening of Election Day, 1966, and the director’s world was caving in. Here he was, on the air with the desperately important Election Night coverage, competing with the two enemy networks to see whose magnificently transistorized, fearfully fast electronic computer could predict the poll results soonest and best. Live coverage: tense-voiced, sweating announcers, papers flapping around, aura of unbearable suspense. The whole country watching. And what happens? The damned computer quits.
.RCA 301 computer now steps up to big system workpower!
Core memory doubled to 40,000 characters! Magnetic tape capability increased to twelve or more 66,000 character/second tape units! System rentals remain low, and you can still begin on a small scale!Already widely accepted by business and government, the RCA 301 has been so stepped up in workpower that the running time for many jobs has been cut in half. Now it can also tackle much larger and more complex jobs, and can be greatly extended in capacity as your work load grows.
.THINKING MACHINES ARE GETTING SMARTER
By Robert Strother
AT THE Vanguard Computing Center – in Washington, D. C, I watched a young woman present a machine with an extremely complex problem in ballistics involving hundreds of variables. At once lights on a control panel twinkled and winked as the computer checked to see that all equipment was operating properly. Then it set briskly to work. Magnetic tapes spun in their shiny glass-and-steel vacuum cabinets, the high-speed printer muttered. Suddenly the machine stopped and the electric typewriter wrote: “Last entry improperly stated!”
.YOUR business will benefit with NCR Data Processing!
Regardless of the type or size of your business, you will benefit from the efficiencies of National Data Processing. From one or more of NCR’s original entry products—accounting machines, cash registers, listing, window posting and receipting systems—you can get just the input media of your need and choice. This may be punched paper tape or punched cards.
.COMPUTERS: THEIR SCOPE TODAY
ARTICLE BY ERNEST HAVEMANN
AT THE Massachusetts Institute of Technology there sits a giant computer, its lights constantly blinking and its dials endlessly churning out new numbers, on which some unknown technician has fastened one of the buttons now so popular among the hippie set. The button reads:
I AM A HUMAN BEING.
DO NOT FOLD, SPINDLE OR MUTILATENewcomers to the laboratory spot the button, move in for a closer look and nod—yet seldom smile. To most people who deal with computers, the button seems not funny, not ridiculous, not cynical but oddly appropriate.
