Suitcase Brain (Aug, 1950)
It’s Small But Smart, This “Suitcase Brain”
Not much larger than a suitcase, a new electonic “brain” can handle most of the intracate problems solved by huge automatic computers, some of them almost the size of a basketball court. The small computer, called the Madida for it’s initials (magnetic drum digital differential analyzer) was designed by 31-year-old Floyd G. Steele. It is only two feed wide, four feed long and three feet high, and weighs 750 pounds. When a difficult problem is fed into the Maddida it comes up with an answer accurate to within one part in a million.
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Ahh those were the good old days, when you needed a masters degree in technology to operate a calculator.
Just *try* getting a suitcase that size on a plane these days. Or even a train, for that matter.
The verion of the MADDIDA that was sold commercially, as an add-on for the Bendix G-15 computer (or for use separately) was a floor-standing item too big for one person to carry. But it was a useful device to accelerate certain specialized types of calculations.