The birth of the Soviet missile defense system. Towards a Unified System
Let's try to understand this extremely confusing stories.
The first question that awaits us is - why did they try to copy the EU, how did IBM get to the S / 360 series, and was it good?
The second question, which we will consider in parallel - could the USSR, in 15 years of attempts to create something equally outstanding by 1965?
And finally, the third and final - how did it all turn out in the end?
Due to the huge amount of information, this article will also be released in two parts.
IBM machines shaped the XNUMXth century and the technological development of civilization no less than nuclear weapon... Competing with the United States in the production of computers, the USSR, in fact, fought with IBM, and the corporation won, while it owes its technological superiority to only one thing.
System / 360.
IBM invested more than $ 5 billion in this project in 1964 prices (if you recalculate for the gold rate, then in 2022 prices it is 254,56 billion), which made it the most expensive R&D in human history, after the Apollo program, even ITER cheaper to build.
For 15 years of development of microelectronics, the USSR did not realize a simple idea: the architecture of a computer itself does not solve anything, it solves the whole complex, and building it from scratch is a monstrously laborious task, which had to be started back in the XNUMXth century, which the United States was doing successfully.
Let's take a look at the evolution of IBM, looking at the key moments that allowed it to dominate by 1965 and create the S / 360, and then it will be revealed to us why we wanted to copy it so badly and why, alas, it did not help us very much.
The history of this company is publicly available, so we will focus only on conceptually important facts.
Step 1, happy childhood, 1887-1914
First you need to understand a simple truth. Big business, like a big tree, doesn't grow overnight.
All the companies that divided the planet by the 1960s were founded in 1850-1900. Later, there will not be enough time. Even in our insanely accelerated age, it takes a company 30 years to reach its peak.
Accordingly, if the USSR wanted to achieve parity in high technologies with the United States by 1960, alas, it had to start at the end of the XNUMXth century. Everyone in the Union, in general, understood this axiom, hence the constant slogans "catch up and overtake", "five-year plan in four years" and so on.
In 1887, Herman Hollerith invents the Hollerith Electric Tabulating System, a machine that can automate almost any statistical calculation, and is awarded a government contract to process census data.
Censuses follow one after another: 1890 (USA and Austria-Hungary), 1891 (Canada, Norway), 1893 (agricultural census in the USA), 1894 (Italy), 1897 (France and the Russian Empire). Hollerith founds the Tabulating Machine Company (TMC) in 1896.
By 1915, 1 people already worked for the future IBM; by 672, their number had grown to 1950.
Think about these numbers.
By the time the USSR began to build the first computers, about 50 people had heard about computing technology in it, while in the United States by that time, a total of more than 100 thousand computer scientists, programmers, engineers and university teachers were dealing with the problems of creating computers on for fifty years!
Already by 1800, the number of American colleges and universities had tripled, by 1820 there were more than 40. It was at this time that two basic principles of American higher education were formulated: the sovereignty of the educational institution and freedom for students in the choice of subjects and courses.
In 1824, the Rensselier Polytechnic Institute was opened, which awarded graduates the title of bachelor of technical disciplines. By the 1850s, a number of legendary Ivy League universities had added science courses to their curriculum.
By the end of the 1891th century, elite private universities specializing in engineering were founded, each of them became legend: Stanford University (Leland Stanford Jn. University, 1868), University of California (UCLA, 1891), Berkeley College ( The University of California, Berkeley), California Institute of Technology (Caltech, 1861) and, finally, the greatest of them - Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, XNUMX), which later became a real computer Mecca.
The technical achievements of universities led to an increase in appropriations from the state, large monopolies and private investors, so the most prestigious universities turned by the beginning of the XNUMXth century into large, well-equipped scientific centers that established contacts with industry, banking, educational and scientific institutions in Europe.
Between 1900 and 1939, the number of engineering and mathematician students grew from 238 to 000, and one in ten of them worked for future computer corporations! By 1, there were 494 students per 000 people of the total population: in Russia - 1914, in Japan - 1, in France - 000, in Great Britain - 59, in Germany - 146, in the USA - 148 people! Hollerith himself graduated from the Mining School at the elite Columbia University in 152, taught at MIT, and became a PhD in 175.
By the end of the 15th century, no more than 000 people (per 122 million population!) Were studying in Russian universities, including theology departments. After that, the figure of 21% of the literate population in the Russian Empire (literacy meant the ability to read only) is not surprising according to the data of the first and last tsarist census of 1897-1905. The highest percentage of literate people (70–80%) was given by the three Baltic provinces, and in the capitals the indicators were appalling - 55% of Petersburgers were able to read / write skillfully, and less than half of Muscovites!
The Bolsheviks tried to rectify the situation, but a snag arose.
Firstly, education does not arise out of the blue, teachers must also be taught by someone, and the small intelligentsia of the Russian Empire was almost completely destroyed or expelled during the years of the Civil War.
Secondly, we have already repeatedly mentioned that from 1930 to 1953, everything that contradicted the understanding of Marxism was cleared out of universities by party officials.
As a result, advanced technical education in the Union really began only with the death of Stalin. The Americans had a 100+ year head start here, and it was impossible to overcome it by the 1960s at all.
Another key to the successful development of IBM was the American government, which is always ready to support technical innovation indefinitely.
Hollerith earned his first millions on a contract with the Census Bureau, we have already talked about the Vannevar Bush era and Silicon Valley.
In general, in total over the XNUMXth century, the US government has poured several trillion dollars in modern prices into the scientific developments of corporations.
In the USSR, comparable amounts were poured exclusively into the military industry.
In 1987, the cost tank T-72B1 amounted to 236 rubles, T-930B - 64 rubles, T-358UD as much as 000 rubles. In 80, the Soviet army had, according to some sources, more than 733 tanks, worth about $ 000 billion in prices of those years. If we take into account that in 1991-69 there were also more than 000 T-35/1953 tanks in service, which cost no less, and add R&D costs, then in total the great and completely useless tank armada of the Union cost him about 1960 billion dollars in prices of those years.
The cost of the senseless invasion of Afghanistan is another 30 billion, about 200 billion was spent on aid to Cuba, Africa, Iraq, North Korea and others. In fact, all this money was wasted in vain, since the USSR did not receive any significant financial or geopolitical benefit from these expenses.
Много это или мало?
On the one hand, it is not enough how the Union was financially impoverished by US standards, says a simple fact.
The development of the B-2 alone cost $ 45 billion in 1980s prices (like all Soviet tanks put together!), One Fluorinert FC74 coolant for it from 3M cost more than $ 50 per gallon.
On the other hand, in terms of 2022 at the rate of gold - in total, the USSR has poured over the entire period of its existence into various projects an amount that is unequivocally comparable to a trillion dollars.
The Americans poured money on the fertile soil of elite universities, scientific clusters and corporate laboratories. The USSR spent its last strength on supporting the Mozambican rebels and the ranks of tanks stretching to the horizon (and several completely insane military projects, such as monstrous over-the-horizon radars, which eventually did not work so normally, the Taran project, attempts to clone the Space Shuttle, etc.) important for the country).
The approximate cost of production of Soviet computers is known - they ranged from several hundred thousand to a million rubles, in fact, you can change it at the rate "2 tanks = 1 computer". Nevertheless, tanks that were never useful (except for the periodic suppression of uprisings) were made in total over 100 thousand, and computers (even taking into account the later series of the EU!) - for the entire huge USSR, there were no more than 25-30 thousand.
Step 2, successful adolescence, 1914-1944
So Hollerith was able to found a company that had not yet dominated the market. Censuses are good business, but globally negligible.
Hollerith tried to find new markets, for example, he negotiated an agreement with the Englishman Robert Porter, who licensed the subsidiary Tabulator Limited in 1902. By 1909 TL was renamed British Tabulating Machine Company Limited.
He also tried to raise the rental price of his cars, and in vain, in 1905 the government invested $ 40 in alternative designs by engineer James Legrand Powers, founder of the Powers Tabulating Machine Company (PTMC, 000).
Taking advantage of this, the Census Bureau denied TMC a monopoly contract for participation in the 1910 census, transferring 60% of the work to PTMC. Hollerith was on the verge of ruin - he had no other source of income besides the census.
In 1911, he was forced to sell the company to the "father of trusts" to millionaire Charles Ranlett Flint, who by that time had assembled the International Time Recording Company, Computing Scale Company of America and Bundy Manufacturing Company. So, this is where the IBM story could have ended before it really began.
What mistake did Hollerith make?
He was no businessman and decided that he would take out the technology, but he himself did not see its full potential (just as the USSR had more than once held treasures in its hands - Setun, Almaz, Osokin's microcircuits, Yuditsky's microprocessors, the M-9 line - M-13, and did not dispose of any of this).
Companies assembled by Flint produced a bunch of commercial equipment - industrial scales, factory clocks, and even cheese slicers! Tabulators were just a part of a pile of all kinds of equipment for factories and offices.
Nobody knew or imagined at that moment - what exactly from this junk would change history?
A businessman was needed.
In 1914, Flint found the right person - Thomas John Watson Sr., a former top manager of the National Cash Register (the famous NCR, inventor of the cash register).
NCR chief John Henry Patterson was one of the greatest businessmen in history. Patterson was distinguished by phenomenal sagacity, which he taught his subordinates, it was he who first saw and discovered the full power of the cash register, underestimated by its inventor James Ritty, bought all his patents and rushed headlong into the development of technology.
He first founded a sales training school back in 1893 and introduced a comprehensive welfare program for his workers. Patterson's contribution to the concept of marketing is enormous. He is traditionally described in NCR as “an industrialist, social reformer, patriot, benevolent tyrant, father of modern sales,” and all this is true.
It was from his boss that Watson learned the main idea: the client first! First, Watson assembled the entire trust in the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Corporation, threw away the clocks and slicers, saw the phenomenal potential of tabulators, allocated 15% of the company's revenues to engineering research, and began aggressive sales by growing a clone of NCR from the CTR.
In 1915, CTR's motto was THINK, an inscription hanging over a table in Watson's office. In 1917, Watson opened branches in Canada and Brazil, and by 1920 the first serious novelty appeared, the Hollerith Type III Tabulator, which was able to print the result.
Finally, Watson waited until his teacher Patterson died and renamed the clumsy Computing-Tabulating-Recording to the NCR logic. National became International, Cach became Business, and Register became Machines.
IBM was born.
Watson's great strength was in his foresight.
He was the first to realize that the tabulator is a real treasure, suitable not only for the census. During the 1920s, the American economy was booming, and the demand for tabulators and adding machines grew rapidly. Upon learning of the results of studies that claimed that only 2% of all calculations in the United States are automated, Watson happily exclaimed:
Just imagine what vast open spaces for work lie before us!
IBM has outlined three main promotional strategies.
First, tabulators began to be massively advertised as the essential machine in every self-respecting office, and by the mid-1930s, thousands of tabulators were operating in the United States. Before Excel and 1C: huge trusts and factories would not have been able to exist at all without these rumbling dinosaurs.
Million dollar wages and deals, taxes, reports, lawsuits, patents, product plans, logistics, data on hundreds of thousands of workers, and the characteristics of thousands of products were all stamped, coded, and processed. If not for IBM, the US industrial revolution not only would not have gained such momentum, but it would not have been possible at all.
Watson's second goal was to hunt for government contracts, and not only in the United States.
Their cars counted the unemployed in American Hooverville, Indians in Brazil and even Jews in concentration camps commissioned by RuSHA - the SS General Directorate for Race and Settlement, and their service, according to some reports, continued even during the war years.
Watson was a real marketing tank, unlike Hollerith, he understood perfectly how to talk with the authorities, and as a result, IBM won an average of 75% of tenders.
By 1930, the company had branches everywhere - from Canada to Italy; by 1939, IBM employed 11 people in enterprises in 000 countries.
Even during the Great Depression in the United States, the company continued its activities at the same pace, practically not laying off employees, which could not be said about other firms. They were again helped by a government contract - as part of the fight against the Depression, the Social Protection Act was introduced in 1935, and the US government had to keep statistics on the employment of more than 25 million people. The tabs required for this were supplied by IBM. The company itself recalls it as "the largest settlement transaction in history."
The third goal of IBM was promotion to universities, and it began with the alma mater of the founder - Columbia University (later, by tradition, he always received full support from IBM).
The genius of IBM's managers (as opposed to Soviet engineers and bureaucrats) lay in one simple idea.
From the very beginning, Watson promoted the tabulator (and later the computer) as a UNIVERSAL machine that absolutely everyone needs - government, universities and business. Actually, even the number 360 appeared in the name System / 360 is by no means accidental - the company emphasized that their mainframe is capable of covering 360-degree tasks.
In the USSR, the principle was completely different - a bunch of specialized computers, 90% of which did not go beyond the limits of use in several specific research institutes or in the military.
In April 1928, Leslie John Comrie, a British astronomer considered to be the pioneer of the theory of computer science calculations, publishes On the Construction of Tables by Interpolation, which describes the use of tabulators for astronomical calculations.
He writes that their use is more efficient, and the results are more accurate (and obtained with fewer errors) than if they were calculated on adding machines (Comrie used a Brunsviga machine for comparison). In the same year, he first used tabulators to calculate the Moon's orbit for the period from 1935 to 2000, using such serious techniques as the Fourier transform, improving the calculations of the famous astronomer Ernest William Brown.
Wallace John Eckert, a student at Columbia University, was so impressed by this achievement that he decided to specialize in mechanized computing. Already a professor, in 1940 he published the book "Punched Card Methods in Scientific Computation", in which he gives algorithms for solving the differential equations of celestial mechanics on a tabulator.
Eckert became director of the Thomas J. Watson Astronomical Computing Bureau at Columbia University and helped found the Advanced Research Department at IBM and the development of four of their early computers. Colombian physicist Dana P. Mitchell, a member of the Manhattan Project, relied on his methods of calculating tabulators, developing algorithms for solving equations of nuclear physics.
Eckert, in general, was one of the forgotten pioneers of computing, he thought about chains of operators on reusable punch cards to perform complex sequences of calculations, becoming one of the forerunners of programming, and designed switches for a tabulator, multiplier and puncher, collecting from them something like a processor that could read and execute chains of instructions up to 12 cards long.
Under Hollerith, each tabulator was made to order for a specific purpose (population census, freight audit, etc.) and was mono-tasking. Only starting from the 1906 model of the Hollerith Type I Tabulator it became possible to set specific programs for it by switching the plugs on the front panel, but the principle was unsuccessful - each machine had to be set up for a couple of hours before use.
Watson's engineers came up with an ingenious solution - replaceable patch panels, introduced with the Hollerith Type 3-S Tabulator in 1925. From now on, the operator could collect a whole library of pre-commutated programs, and just insert the necessary board into the tabulator before calculating.
It was not for nothing that IBM was so fiercely conquering the markets - competitors were stepping on their heels.
BTMC was abandoned by the parent company in 1920 and went into free float, in 1951 they even built their own computer HEC 1 (Hollerith Electronic Computer), in total they produced more than 100 computers of different models (HEC 2, 2M and 4).
PTMC also did not sleep, and in 1915 they opened their branch in Britain - Accounting and Tabulating Machine Company of Great Britain Limited, and in 1922 in France - SAMAS (Societe Anonyme des Machines a Statistiques). In 1927, PTMC merged with the renowned typewriter and small arms manufacturer Remington Typewriter Company and the little-known electrical appliance manufacturer Rand Kardex Company to form the second legend, Remington Rand.
The great commercial wars IBM and Remington Rand have made history and contributed to tremendous technological progress. As soon as one of the companies was about to rest on its laurels, the second released a revolutionary product and gave Sonya a savory kick.
We owe 90% of the progress in the field of computers in the first post-war decade to the intense struggle between these dinosaurs.
In the USSR, there was nothing similar - the role of corporations was played by ministries, the role of SEO was by ministers, and the role of the market was by the party.
1950s calculators. Bull GAMMA 3, the penultimate independent development of the French from the Compagnie des Machines Bull (photo - museum https://www.technikum29.de). There is very little information about the Powers-Samas machines and even fewer photos of them. The pictures show the Raleigh Computer Center at the University of Nottingham, early 1960s, the top photo shows three Powers-Samas Program Controlled Computer calculators, released in 1957, the bottom one shows the girls' hall with tabulators (photo https: //www.bearsbarn. com).
In the West, competition continued to flourish.
In 1921, an IBM-inspired engineer at the Norwegian insurance company Storebrand, Fredrik Rosing Bull, files a patent for an alternative design punch card sorting and adder.
A limited number of Bull tabs were produced by the Danish company Hafnia, and ten years later the patents fall into the hands of the French - Georges Vieillard, Elie Doury and Emile Genon, who immediately found the Compagnie des Machines Bull.
In 1929, ATMC and SAMAS merged to form Powers-Samas Accounting Machine Limited, and in 1959 BTMC merged with former Powers-Samas rival to become International Computers and Tabulators Limited (ICT).
As we already wrote, the state of affairs in Britain after the war was extremely difficult (unlike the United States), manufacturers survived as best they could. In addition, we have already described the situation as the British yawned the microelectronic revolution, as a result, in 1968, three main English computer manufacturers: ICT (before that in 1964 it bought the computer division from the legendary Ferranti), English Electric Leo Marconi (EELM) and Elliott Automation merged into ICL (International Computers Limited).
Naturally, there was no talk of any international markets in the case of the USSR.
Our products have been quoted only by countries that are at a lower level of technical development than we are. Even the native Sovblok from all sorts of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the GDR not only provided itself, but also goods of such quality, which in the Union were valued on a par with capitalist imports.
In those rare cases, when domestic goods began to interest someone seriously, the USSR itself thwarted the deal. They refused to sell the Setun to the Czechs, no matter how they begged for production, the car of the residual classes was not sold to the French and remained sitting like a dog in the hay, without earning a dime.
At this time in the USA, by the end of 1943, IBM was already leasing 10 tabulators (000% - Type 64, 405% - Type 30). These were the two main workhorses - the 285 only worked with numbers, it appeared in 285 and could handle up to 1933 cards per minute. The more expensive 150 was alphanumeric and entered the market in 405.
With the acquisition of PTMC, Remington has grown into a powerful competitor to IBM.
They initiated the war of cooperative standards, starting to use 90-column punched cards that were not compatible with 80-column cards from IBM, however, IBM won this battle (Powers-Samas, by comparison, did not bother with the idea of compatibility at all - their different machines used 21, 36 , 40, 45, 65 and even 130-column cards).
In addition, a bunch of their innovations have become the standard - from the 8-bit byte to the PC architecture.
In the USSR, with the imposition of its own standard, not only on the world, but at least on a neighboring institute, things were extremely bad, as a result, nothing remained of the great engineering heritage of Soviet computers (and it was, without jokes, in some places great) nothing but incredible fairy tales about pentiums and Pentkovsky.
So, by 1944, IBM had strengthened its position in international markets as much as possible, the number of installations was measured in tens of thousands, they collaborated with governments, including even Japan (in 1937, Wattoson Statistics Accounting Machinery Co., Ltd. was created), and universities and could even implement the most exotic projects (for example, since 1946, the world's first typewriter for Chinese with a 5-character drum has been on sale).
During the war, they continued to earn monstrous sums on government contracts: their tabulators were used by cryptanalysts from Arlington Hall and OP-20-G, worked in the Manhattan Project, were used to keep track of American Japanese interned in concentration camps, as well as for ballistic, logistic and a bunch of other army calculations. and in the nascent discipline of operations research.
In 1931, IBM installed at the Columbia University Bureau of Statistics a monstrous one-of-a-kind unique tabulator, the Columbia Difference Tabulator, nicknamed Packard for its size and power.
It was the first computing machine in history to refer to the term "supercomputer" as New York World reporters called it.
Packard was created by order of Professor Benjamin D. Wood, an eminent statistician, by engineers James Bryce and George Daly at the IBM Endicott plant. For the first time in the world, he could automatically calculate arbitrary powers of a number, accumulate sums of squares, and had 10 parallel adders.
This masterpiece of mechanics is currently in storage at the Smithsonian Institution.
One of the tabulators presented at the exhibition can process and print the results of as many as twelve complex tasks in just one quick operation with an accuracy of 10 decimal places, while similar machines previously could boast only 2 decimal places.
- wrote in the newspaper in an enthusiastic article.
Pilgrims from all scientific centers were drawn to Packard: the Carnegie Foundation, Yale, Pittsburgh, Harvard, the University of California and Princeton. Every day, 10 million punch cards came out of the factory in New York! The company has reached the zenith of fame, but a new test awaits them - the emergence of real computers.
Monstrous Packard - Columbia Difference Tabulator, newspaper article about him. And below - actually a processor assembled by Eckert from the IBM 285 Tabulator, 016 Punch, Switch Box and 601 Multiplying Punch (photo http://www.columbia.edu)
Step 3, Mighty Maturity, 1944-1965
And now we are almost close to the appearance of the S / 360, there is very little left.
In the early 1940s, the second major turning point in the history of the company happened; a mistake could have been made that would have crossed out its entire future. IBM could have missed computers.
Back in 1937, Captain 2nd Rank and Inventor Howard Hathaway Aiken of Harvard proposed to IBM a joint project of a fully automatic relay computer for computing naval ballistic tables, based on the idea of the Babbage machine.
In 1939, Watson approved the project, invested $ 500 in it, and provided Aiken with 000 engineers to help him. The computer, called the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), was completed by 5 at the Endicott plant and shipped to Harvard.
At the presentation, Watson angrily discovered that Aiken Mark I was added to the beautiful steel and glass car body (made at his insistence), and Aiken did not even mention IBM's contribution to this work.
The chief of IBM was very upset by such treachery, but he did not abandon the idea of creating a computer.
In parallel with ASCC, the company was working on another relay machine, now practically unknown to anyone except technology fanatics.
Based on Eckert's ideas, the IBM Pluggable Sequence Relay Calculator (PSRC) was built in 5 copies by 1944. The PSRC, capable of sequencing up to 50 commands, was designed and built by a team led by Clair D. Lake and Benjamin M. Durfee, who previously worked on the Harvard Mk I. Together with Don Piatt ( Don Piatt) they later went on to work on the IBM SSEC. The first two PSRCs were flown to the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland in December 1944 and were operational during the final eight months of the war.
The Aberdeen were smaller than the Harvard Mk I, but, as Eckert explained in 1947,
they were the fastest relay machines in the world. They perform six multiplications per second along with addition, subtraction, read and write operations. They are not as complex as the Mk I because they have less memory and less programming options; however, they are about twenty times faster ...
In addition to the two machines delivered to Aberdeen, three more were built: two for the Eckert laboratory at Columbia University, delivered in September 1946, and one for the naval training ground at Dalgren, Virginia (replaced by the NORC supercomputer in 1955).
PSRC were able to extract square roots, sum harmonic series, multiply matrices, and solve differential equations up to the 6th order! Each machine had 28 counters and a control panel with 2000 different connections.
The Watson Lab machines were able to predict the positions of all 1500 asteroids known for 1947 in two months. The PSRC had 36 registers and the ability to simultaneously read and process four streams of input cards.
Paul E. Ceruzzi writes:
... their architecture was based on punched cards, but during each machine cycle (that is, when the card was read, which took about half a second), the machine could complete a sequence of up to 48 steps, controlled by a device called the Hub. It was also possible to perform a "double cycle", with the next card feed held until the completion of all operations. The control signals at each “point in the sequence” on the hub were sent to four other hubs, so that the machine could perform up to four parallel arithmetic operations (even more if these hubs, in turn, were connected to other hubs).
So much for Lebedev, the "inventor" of the conveyor ...
The ASCC and PSRC were followed by the purely commercial IBM Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC) project, begun in 1944 and completed in 1947.
SSEC ran until 1952, becoming the last large electromechanical computer in the world, most benefiting from the advertising it provided for IBM. The main ideologist of the project was the same tireless astronomer Eckert.
The project budget exceeded $ 1 million - a monstrous amount by the standards of those years.
The machine was also created under the impression of the ENIAC project, the head of the development was Frank Hamilton, who was permanent with ASCC, and the chief architect was Harvard mathematician Robert Sieber Jr. (Robert Rex Seeber Jr.).
Watson called such machines calculators, because a computer in those years stood for a person hired to perform calculations, and he wanted to convey the idea that IBM machines are not designed to replace people, rather, they are designed to help people, relieving them of routine work.
The SSEC was installed in a huge glass-fronted room on the 1st floor of a building next to the IBM headquarters, with hundreds of passers-by crowded to see such a marvel. It was the first computer in the world, the work of which (and indeed of himself!) Could be watched live by everyone.
The advertisements were overwhelming, and there was no newspaper to ignore the SSEC installation. The SSEC room was the first computer room to use the now-standard raised floor architecture to prevent visitors from seeing or tripping over unsightly cables. SSEC operated until August 1952 (also becoming the first computer to play a movie role - "Walk East on Beacon"), after which it was dismantled and replaced by the IBM 701 Electronic Data Processing Machine, also known as the Defense Calculator.
Technically, SSEC represented not an electromechanical, but an electronic-mechanical computer.
His processor worked on 12 tubes, and there were 500 fast registers as well. 8 relays were used in control and memory circuits of 21 slow registers. Despite such antiquity, relays developed by IBM were a masterpiece of mechanics, their response time was only 400 times slower than an almost instantaneous lamp - 150 milliseconds versus one.
The ALU was a modified IBM 603 electron multiplier unit developed by James W. Bryce. SSEC performed calculations with 19-bit decimal numbers (in BCD code), long-term memory of 400 words was implemented on punched tape, a real diesel punk! Punched tapes and their loading device in the form of a chain hoist entirely occupied one of the three walls set aside for the machine.
The machine read instructions and data from 30 readers connected to three punchers, and the results were printed on punched cards or through a high-speed printer. By 1940s standards, SSEC calculations were accurate and fast, although one of its early programmers, the great FORTRAN creator John Warner Backus, the father of formal languages, said:
You had to constantly be there while the program was running, because it crashed every three minutes, and only the people who wrote it could figure out how to start it again.
ENIAC and UNIVAC creator John Adam Presper Eckert Jr. named it
some big monster that never seemed to work right to me.
Sieber's architectural innovation was the representation of commands and data as conceptually equal entities, so in theory SSEC could modify the code as it was executed.
In practice, it was not used in this mode due to the complexity of implementation, therefore, despite the patent "the first machine with a stored program", it is usually considered, rather, the last of the large calculators.
The first application of SSEC was to calculate the ephemeris of the Moon and planets, each point required about 11 additions, 000 multiplications and 9 memory accesses, which took SSEC about seven minutes, the whole work took six months. The corrected and supplemented "The Improved Lunar Ephemeris" then formed the basis for the parameters of the orbits of celestial bodies calculated by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the "Apollo" project.
In addition, SSEC brought commercial benefits, it was leased by General Electric and the US Atomic Energy Commission for the NEPA project.
In 1948-1949, IBM successfully sold tabulators, which had reached their zenith by that time. These were both old models like the IBM 405 and newer ones like the IBM 402, 403 and 407 released in 1948.
Tabulators continued to be produced by the company until the 1970s; the IBM 421, for example, was used until 1971 in numerous branches of the British electric company South Eastern Electric Board and calculated quarterly electricity bills for tens of thousands of customers.
The question arises - why do we scold the USSR for using tabulators before the 1970s, if even Britain did so?
The difference is very simple.
In the USSR, tabulators were organized into calculating stations (of which there weren't that many either) and were used instead of large and medium-sized computers, which the country sorely lacked.
In the West, tabulators, which are getting cheaper every year, were used, in fact, as a replacement for the PC. Almost in every institution - from a shop to a village post office - there was a tabulator that made it easier for ordinary people to work.
In the 1970s, the first microprocessors and microcomputers came along, and tabulators became extinct very quickly.
If IBM in the late 1940s had chosen tabulators, which then brought in huge profits, as its main business, then by the 1980s it would have simply disappeared.
Advertising of the new format of 96-column mini-punched cards for the IBM System / 3 1969. As you can see, the Americans could be conservative, however, the format died without being born, in 1972 there was already an 8 "floppy (photo https://www.flickr .com) The darkest part of IBM history is its collaboration with the SS Racial Authority Photo from IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black.
Fortunately, in addition to tabulators, IBM has been producing the so-called. calculators, that is, machines for automatic multiplication.
What was their difference from adding machines?
They provided streaming processing of information through punched cards and connected by cables to other equipment, allowing them to build high-speed automatic computation pipelines.
In 1946, in the course of work on SSEC, the IBM 602 Calculating Punch appears, performing 4 actions. In the same year, James Wares Bryce developed the IBM 603, the first commercially available full-size tube electron multiplier. About 20 were made because the bulky bulbs were inconvenient, but this machine has proven that there is a demand for similar devices.
Watson sensed the benefits and hired engineers Ralph Palmer and Jerrier A. Haddad to create a more advanced model, the IBM 604 (1948). This calculator was the first to use the famous plug-in modules and miniature lamps, and the machine was so successful that it sold over 5 pieces in 600 years.
Again, imagine in 1950 5 electronic (!) Calculators in the USSR!
On the basis of this model, IBM in 1949 produces a protocomputer, a computing complex of several machines. IBM 604 served in it, as they would say now, ALU, IBM 21 - card reader with it, IBM 402/417 - tabulator and IBM 941 - specialized electromechanical memory for relays, 16 decimal digits, in fact, registers.
The entire farm was wired and sold as an IBM CPC (Card Programmed Calculator). A little later, the CPC-II with the improved ALU IBM 605 was also released.
These models, as a rule, are not classified as computers of the first generation, because they were partially electromechanical (only ALU was electronic) and did not have a stored program, controlled from punched cards. However, CPC played a very important role. They could perform up to 35 op / sec and were produced in over 700 copies.
More than 20 machines have been ordered by government agencies and laboratories, as well as aircraft manufacturers. CPCs played an important role in the development of the Redstone rocket, and in addition, brought considerable marketing benefits.
Customers began to perceive IBM as a leading manufacturer of engineering and scientific equipment, rather than accounting, and the company itself began to smoothly enter a new business for itself.
The IBM 6xx series held out on the market for a long time, in 1953 the 607 came out, and in 1957 the IBM 608 Transistorized Electronic Calculator was one of the first transistorized machines. The IBM 628 Magnetic Core Calculator had magnetic memory and became the most advanced in the line. These machines, more than 10 in number, became the original mini-computers of the 000s, generating colossal revenue for IBM.
While the Harward Mk I was under construction, in 1943, professor at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, John William Mauchly, and his student John Eckert were simultaneously building the famous ENIAC under contract with the military.
Upon completion, they founded the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC), planning to make and sell computers to everyone.
The insolence of the two engineers was boundless - in those days no one could even think of creating a commercial computer: the machines available in the world could be counted on the fingers of one hand, no company produced anything like that, not a single consumer had heard of them. Nothing was clear at all - neither their future purpose, nor their possible popularity, nor the volume of the market, even what tasks in general, except for calculating artillery tables, could be entrusted to them.
Eckert and Mauchly set out to convince customers that they needed a completely new and insanely expensive item, while even IBM did not really know why they built SSEC.
Moreover, novice businessmen had no idea what technical problems they would have to solve, how much they would build a car, and even how much it would cost them: how much money to demand from the customer!
They decided to start off the beaten path - the Bureau of the Census and promised them a car for $ 300. The mistake almost became fatal - the legendary UNIVAC I (Universal Automatic Computer) cost more than a million.
As a result, EMCC was on the verge of bankruptcy, and all that was left was to sell it. Three large companies could lay claim to a completely new market - NCR, IBM and Remington Rand, only the latter did not refuse.
UNIVAC I was completed and became the first commercial general-purpose civilian computer in the world.
From 1951 to 1958, 46 more copies of the machine were created, they were installed in government agencies, private corporations and in three universities in the United States.
How did Remington show such discernment?
In the late 1940s, the head of the company, James Rand (Sr., an outstanding businessman and visionary, better than Steve Jobs), set the goal of simultaneously creating computers of three types: for government organizations (read the army), scientific research and business, which replaced would be obsolete tabulators.
IBM was late in entering a new market due to a number of objective and subjective factors. As the largest company in the tabulator market, it tried for a long time on its own, without the help of government contracts, to create a computer in order to retain exclusive patents, but even such a large company could not take the risk of creating a machine without a guaranteed purchase order (and Eckert and Mauchly took a chance).
Market prospects at that time were rather uncertain, even experts expressed doubts about the future of insufficiently reliable lamp machines.
The company's engineers persistently sought to arouse the administration's interest in the passing computer revolution, interested in Thomas Watson Jr., vice president of the firm. In addition, antitrust laws also influenced the purchase decision.
IBM was huge anyway, and anti-monopoly officials gritted their teeth, acquiring a couple more companies could have drained their patience.
Watson Sr. also did not want to undermine the tabulatory business, which brings guaranteed millions now, unlike computers, which would inevitably compete with them, but would not have arisen yet.
Rand achieved the first two goals of the firm through two acquisitions: EMCC in 1950, which he intended to create computers for business, and ERA (familiar to us from the story with Cray) in 1951, which was supposed to make scientific computers.
In addition, having received a whole staff of engineers and a packet of patents, the company also developed its own model: the Remington Rand Model 409, releasing it in the same year in 1951 (a programmable calculator on punch cards, the size of a large cabinet, similar to the IBM 605).
The UNIVAC brand rose to prominence in the 1950s after CBC News used UNIVAC to predict early results on November 4, 1952, on presidential election night.
According to the poll, E. Stevenson was in the lead, but computer analysis predicted D. Eisenhower's clear victory. Not trusting the technology, the journalists published the results after the elections, but the UNIVAC brand remained in the memory of many.
Moreover, in the mass consciousness the terms univac and computer became synonyms for another 10 years (it was not enough for us to call modern computers "univacs", like copiers - copiers).
IBM ASCC (photo https://cdn.britannica.com), IBM PSRC (photo http://www.columbia.edu) and board from it (photo https://www.ssec.wisc.edu), IBM SSEC (photo https://queerfragments.files.wordpress.com)
Of course, the first UNIVACs weren't enough for everyone.
And since the mid-1950s, businesses began to massively purchase purely scientific computers (for example, in 1955, General Electric acquired the IBM 702 to automate the work with payrolls and other documents at its plant in Schenectady, before that they became the first corporate clients of UNIVAC, having bought one of the first payroll machines), and he himself began to order the development of new ones (for example, Bank of America in 1959 automated payment processes using an ERMA computer created for them at the Stanford Research Institute).
The result was a computer boom.
Computer courses and faculties were organized, new machines were developed, books were published and thousands of specialists graduated with the guarantee of excellent employment. Literally 10 years after the launch of UNIVAC I in the United States, a huge branch of development and production of computers appeared from scratch.
To be continued ...
- Alexey Eremenko
- https://cdn.britannica.com, http://www.columbia.edu, https://www.ssec.wisc.edu, https://queerfragments.files.wordpress.com, https://www.bearsbarn.com, https://www.technikum29.de, https://www.flickr.com
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