A Digital Computer for Scientific Applications

During the past two years development has been initiated on several large-scale automatic digital computing machines, both in this country and abroad. The present paper is concerned with the over-all organization of one such machine. A logical division of the machine into four major components is described, and the machine performance is interpreted in terms of these component functions. The electronic techniques used to accomplish the storage, transmission, and arithmetic manipulation of numbers, together with certain methods used for control of the computer, are briefly discussed. Although the paper is concerned with the design of a particular machine, it is felt that the design problems and engineering techniques are applicable to most large-scale computing machines.