SEAC (computer)

SEAC (Standards Eastern Automatic Computer)1 was a first-generation cyberbanking computer, congenital in 1950 by the U.S. National Bureau of Standards (NBS) and was initially alleged the National Bureau of Standards Interim Computer, because it was a small-scale computer advised to be congenital bound and put into operation while the NBS waited for added able computers to be completed. SEAC was approved in April 1950, and in May 1950 it went into abounding production, authoritative it the aboriginal absolutely anatomic stored-program cyberbanking computer in the US

Description

Based on EDVAC, SEAC acclimated alone 747 exhaustion tubes (a baby cardinal for the time) eventually broadcast to 1500 tubes. It had 10,500 germanium diodes which performed all of the argumentation functions. They were broadcast to 16,000. It was the aboriginal computer to do all of its argumentation with solid-state devices. The tubes were acclimated alone for accession and/or inversion. The apparatus acclimated 64 acoustic adjournment curve to abundance 512 words of memory, with anniversary chat actuality 45 $.25 in size. The alarm amount was kept low (1 MHz).

The computer's apprenticeship set consisted of alone eleven types of instructions: fixed-point addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division; comparison, and ascribe & achievement eventually broadcast to 16.

The accession time was 864 microseconds and the multiplication time was 2980 microseconds (i.e. abutting to 3 milliseconds).

Applications

in some occasions SEAC was acclimated by a alien teletype. This makes it one of the aboriginal computers to be acclimated remotely. With abounding modifications, it was acclimated until 1964. Some of the problems run on it dealt with:

agenda imaging, led by Russell A. Kirsch

meteorology

beeline programming

optical lenses

a affairs for Los Alamos National Laboratory

tables for LORAN navigation

statistical sampling plans

beachcomber action of the helium atom

designing a proton synchrotron