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Faster, Faster: A Simple Description of a Giant Electronic Calculator and the Problems it Solves
This book explains in non-technical language how a calculator operates, the nature of the problems it solves, and how the problems are presented to the calculator. The calculator covered is the IBM NORC, designed and built for the Bureau of Ordnance of the U. S. Navy as a research and development project. The calculator from 1955 takes up an entire room uses magnetic tape reels and card-tape-card machines.
160 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1955
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April 21, 2025
This is description of the Naval Ordinance Research Calculator (NORC) for a lay reader. It was written by Wallace J. Eckert the (then) head of the IBM Thomas J. Watson Computing Laboratory where the NORC was developed for the Navy. Watson was an accomplished astronomy professor and also headed the Naval Almanac Office in Washington during World War II, he had worked extensively on machine computation in the 30s and 40s, before heading up the Watson lab in 1945. Rebecca Jones the co-author was a researcher at the lab and an accomplished astronomical researcher in her own right working in stellar statistics. Other researchers at the laboratory contributed to this slim volume.
It is a clear and comprehensive description of the operating principles and characteristics of the machine. Including some of the basics of digital computation, programming and error checking (the NORC used a system of error checking similar to parity checking in later computers). Various subsidiary operations of the machine are also discussed such as printing and maintenance. The volume has many good photographs of the machine and its components, along with instructive diagrams, tables and so on.
The book is a good description of this particular machine and the basic principles of modern computation. It is remarkable how much of the subject is already developed at least in basic form. One area where the early state of development is evident is in the lack of references to programming languages. There is a brief mention of the concept as "speed coding" once in the book with an explanation that the NORC has been designed so that its basic operations have been designed so as to facilitate coding in much the way such systems would making them redundant.
The other significant indication of its early composition is that the NORC is consistently referred to as a calculator rather than a computer as we would now call it (some have called it the 1st super computer because it was the first machine whose basic clock speed was a Megahertz perhaps the 1st machine to achieve that speed and it was designed to be state of the art when it was completed in 1954). It is said this reflected a directive from IBM to avoid the term computer which was associated with a human being least it be thought that these machines would replace and put humans out of work. The focus of the book is on the NORC as a calculator (computer) for scientific problems and so there is little if any discussion of business or other data processing uses of computers, focusing instead on extensive numerical computations.
This book is highly legible and the two copies I have come across are in pretty good shape for 70 year old books.
It is a clear and comprehensive description of the operating principles and characteristics of the machine. Including some of the basics of digital computation, programming and error checking (the NORC used a system of error checking similar to parity checking in later computers). Various subsidiary operations of the machine are also discussed such as printing and maintenance. The volume has many good photographs of the machine and its components, along with instructive diagrams, tables and so on.
The book is a good description of this particular machine and the basic principles of modern computation. It is remarkable how much of the subject is already developed at least in basic form. One area where the early state of development is evident is in the lack of references to programming languages. There is a brief mention of the concept as "speed coding" once in the book with an explanation that the NORC has been designed so that its basic operations have been designed so as to facilitate coding in much the way such systems would making them redundant.
The other significant indication of its early composition is that the NORC is consistently referred to as a calculator rather than a computer as we would now call it (some have called it the 1st super computer because it was the first machine whose basic clock speed was a Megahertz perhaps the 1st machine to achieve that speed and it was designed to be state of the art when it was completed in 1954). It is said this reflected a directive from IBM to avoid the term computer which was associated with a human being least it be thought that these machines would replace and put humans out of work. The focus of the book is on the NORC as a calculator (computer) for scientific problems and so there is little if any discussion of business or other data processing uses of computers, focusing instead on extensive numerical computations.
This book is highly legible and the two copies I have come across are in pretty good shape for 70 year old books.
Displaying 1 of 1 review