NORC was created for the Navy on a research and development basis under a cost-plus-fixed-fee
arrangement (the fixed fee was a whopping $1.00). IBM undertook the project
to gain valuable experience in designing, building and maintaining a machine
for intensive technical computing that would incorporate the latest technologies.
In doing so, the company wanted to push beyond the capabilities of its powerful
Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC) of 1948 to produce a machine
rated at more than 200 SSECs. (The SSEC was the first operating computer to
combine electronic computation with stored instructions. It had more than 12,000
vacuum tubes and 21,000 electromechanical relays.)
The SSEC at IBM HQ
in New York City
What IBM turned over to the Navy 50 years ago was a computer
characterized by high-speed, high-precision, floating-point
operations, automatic address modification, and automatic
checking of arithmetic accuracy.
Using eight special ultra high-speed magnetic tape units
from IBM's Poughkeepsie Laboratory, NORC could read 70,000
characters a second from a single tape (it would take
14,000 people to type that much data in the same time.)
Numbers stored in NORC's memory could be recalled in eight-millionths
of a second from any one of 2,000 locations. The computer
could produce records at the rate of 18,000 characters
a minute on printers built at IBM's Endicott facility.
With its unsurpassed speed and reliability, NORC handled
such problems as intricate ballistic computations that
involved billions of multiplications, divisions, additions
and subtractions. The calculations, for example, were
used to evaluate the exact position of a projectile or
missile through every moment of its flight, factoring
in such variables as weather, wind, temperature, air pressure
and muzzle velocity. |
