The SMART lab report

The computing environment at Harvard in 1961 was comparable to what the Smithsonian now has. Harvard had Howard Aiken's Mark I, still in one piece and still working; it has now been divided, half at Harvard and half at IBM, each purely an exhibit. Harvard also had Aiken's Mark IV, although it was no longer used and was sold in 1962 to somebody who basically wanted the glass in the cabinets. These machines had greatly outlived their normal life because they used electric typewriters as output devices. In 1961, the standard line printer devices printed very poor quality material, and people who wanted to compute tables and photo-reproduce them for publication had kept using the old machines for their printing quality.