.Tiny Transistors and Printed Circuits Are Important Developments in Electronics
TRANSISTORS, subminiature tubes and printed circuits are now being brought to the attention of the general reader, who may be amazed at their tiny size and remarkable possibilities. Most radio students and experimenters are familiar with sub-miniature tubes and the unbelievably small components used in printed circuits, especially in the manner in which they are used in hearing aids.
Not too shabby for $62K in 1952, this thing operates at .12Mhz has roughly 2K of memory and each tape holds around 360K.
Plus for all you case modders, it already comes with 200 glowing tubes. Try to beat that with your little LEDs.
.ANNOUNCING A GENERAL PURPOSE DIGITAL COMPUTER
to meet all your
COMPUTING NEEDSPrice $62,500
complete with tape drive and typewriter
Available 120 days*ELECOM 110 — SPECIFICATIONS
MEMORY—magnetic drum, 512 word capacity. WORD LENGTH—30 binary digits and sign.
ARITHMETIC OPERATIONS—Addition; Subtraction; Multiplication (with round-off); multiplication (complete product); Division (with round-off); division (with remainder).
LOGICAL OPERATIONS— extraction; shift right; shift left; tally; overflow branch; conditional transfer of control (branch); halt; input and output operations.
This machine was also known as the UNIVAC 1103
.ANOTHER REMINGTON RAND ELECTRONIC DEVELOPMENT
Remington Rand introduces the ERA 1103 general-purpose computer systemADVANCED LOGICAL AND ENGINEERING FEATURES
â– ACCOMMODATES WIDE OPTION OP DIRECT INPUT-OUTPUT DEVICES
Punched-card equipment Communications circuits Punched-paper and magnetic tapes Process-actuating mechanisms High-speed printers Graphic visual displays
â– FLEXIBLE DATA REPRESENTATION
Alphabetic and numeric data in any code
â– INHERENT HIGH SPEED AND LARGE CAPACITY
Coordinated electrostatic and magnetic drum storage Magnetic tape storage
â– EFFICIENT, VERSATILE PROGRAMMING
Powerful instruction repertoire Flexible two-address logic
â– UNEXCELLED RELIABILITY
Components of service-proved design Preventive diagnostic features Integral air conditioning
â– LOW DATA-PROCESSING COST
For complete information about the application of the ERA 1103 to your problems, write on your business letterhead to Room 1734, 315 Fourth Ave., New York 10.
It seems to me that anyone who would use the phrase “Getting Closer to Infinity” does not really understand the concept of infinity.
.GETTING CLOSER TO INFINITY
Businessmen, engineers, and scientists now are solving problems in scientific and industrial data processing which, a few short years ago, would have been considered well-nigh infinite.IBM Electronic Business Machines are making an important contribution to this progress. These machines accomplish once-overwhelming tasks with incredible speed and accuracy … freeing thousands of valuable minds for creative effort.
IBM
ELECTRONIC BUSINESS MACHINES
International Business Machines
This is the first in a series of 5 articles I’ve scanned from an amazing 1952 issue of Scientific American about Automatic Control. It discusses automatic machine tools, feedback loops, the role of computers in manufacturing and information theory. These are really astounding articles considering the time in which they were written, plus they have some great pictures (not this one so much, but the others).
I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.
.AUTOMATIC CONTROL
An introduction to seven articles about self-regulating machines, which represent a scientific and technological revolution that will powerfully shape the future of man
by Ernest Nagel
AUTOMATIC CONTROL is not a new thing in the world. Self-regulative mechanisms are an inherent feature of innumerable processes in nature, living and non-living. Men have long recognized the existence of such mechanisms in living forms, although, to be sure, they have often mistaken automatic regulation for the operation of some conscious design or vital force. Even the deliberate construction of self-regulating machines is no innovation: the history of such devices goes back at least several hundred years.
Nevertheless, the preacher’s weary cry that there is nothing new under the sun is at best a fragment of the truth. The general notion of automatic control may be ancient, but the formulation of its principles is a very recent achievement. And the systematic exploitation of these principles—their subtle theoretical elaboration and far-reaching practical application—must be credited to the 20th century. When human intelligence is disciplined by the analytical methods of modern science, and fortified by modern material resources and techniques, it can transform almost beyond recognition the most familiar aspects of the physical and social scene. There is surely a profound difference between a primitive recognition that some mechanisms are self-regulative while others are not, and the invention of an analytic theory which not only accounts for the gross facts but guides the construction of new types of systems.
.WANT IT LATER?
You can delay that signal with an
ERA BOUNDARY-DISPLACEMENT MAGNETIC RECORDING DELAY LINE
FREQUENCY RANGE—any five-octave band between 5 cps and 30,000cps, with appropriate drum speed.DELAY—up to 1000 wavelengths of information storage per channel; 200-second delay maximum at 5 cps—proportionately less with increase in frequency.
.Reading Machine Spells Out Loud
Experimental eleetronic device looks at printing and says what it sees — at the rate of 60 words a minute.
By Martin Mann
PS photos by Hubert Luckett
SOME time ago, The New Yorker magazine satirically described the invention of a reading machine. “It is obvious,” a fictional Professor Entwhistle was quoted as saying, “that the greatest waste of our civilization is the time spent in reading. We have been able to speed up practically everything. . . . But today a man takes just as long to read a book as Dante did. … So I have invented a machine. It operates by a simple arrangement of photoelectric cells. . .”
A simple arrangement of photoelectric cells that will read a book for you now has been unveiled by RCA researchers. The device looks at printed matter and reads it aloud, letter by letter. It sounds like a radio announcer spelling out “R-I-N-S-O.”
For a lot more info check out this page on the amazing New York Worlds Fair ’64 site.
.Inside IBM’s World’s Fair ‘Egg’
FROM a distance, it looks like the storage tank for the Festival of Gas. But as New York World’s Fair visitors draw nearer, they find themselves in a people trap—IBM’s wonderfully zany exhibit pavilion, featuring the Information Machine.
It’s really a theater that sits atop a forest of 45 stylized, 32-foot-high sheet-metal trees. Their cleverly dovetailed branches support 14,000 gray and green Plexiglas leaves, forming a continuous, one-acre canopy.
You join a couple of thousand others who are queueing up on a complex of catwalks suspended above a shallow pool. The ramps lead to a 45-degree tilted grandstand, holding 500 spectators. Eventually, you take your place on what IBM calls the “people wall.” Its 12 tiers of seats are no sooner filled than an M.C. in white tie and tails comes gliding down above you in a “bucket.” He promises that in the next 12 minutes you’ll learn that computers make use of everyday methods we all use in our daily lives to solve complicated problems.
Very cool, if a somewhat optimistic article from 1958 about machine translation.
.Breaking the Language Barrier
Each year, millions of reports on scientific research are published—a big fraction of them in foreign languages. In this mass of Russian, Dutch, Chinese, Hindustani data are clues to H-power, interplanetary flight, more powerful batteries, longer-wearing tires. The trouble is: Too few scientists and engineers read foreign languages. What we need is a machine to read one language and type in another: an automatic translator. We’re trying to build—not one, but several. Engineering problems? Fantastic. Here’s where we stand now.
I love how they speak in absolutes “never makes a mistake”, “perfect chess techniques”. I’m worndering how it could possibly play chess at all. My guess is that what they mean is it always makes a legal move, i.e. pawns don’t go sideways.
Also, does that board look a little small to you?
.Mechanical Chess Opponent
Chess fans can play solitaire against a machine that never makes a mistake. Invented by a Spaniard, the machine teaches perfect chess techniques. Whenever an error is made in play, a light flashes on automatically.
