Measures for Progress: A History of the National Bureau of Standards

456 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946-51)
western half. Centralizing in the Bureau the solution of complex mathemati-
cal problems confronting Federal agencies in aeronautics, atomic and nuclear
physics, ballistics, and guided missiles, as well as analysis of massive data
problems, would avoid duplicating computer facilities in other agencies and
make maximum use of the Bureau facility, as was being done in radio
propagation.
The "central facility" idea was short lived. Other agencies wanted
their own computers, and at the request of the Army Map Service and the
Air Comptroller, the Bureau entered into additional contracts with Eckert
and Mauchly.8°
While awaiting design results, the Bureau began work on a small-scale
unit, the NBS Interim Computer, with which to test components, train opera-
tors, and handle computational work in its laboratories. The successful
operation of the unit led to its expansion, with Air Comptroller support, as
a full-scale machine. In the autumn of 1949, 20 months after beginning
construction, it emerged as the National Bureau of Standards Eastern Auto-
matic Computer (SEAC) •81
The fastest general purpose, automatically sequenced electronic com-
puter then in operation, SEAC was dedicated on June 20, 1950. Failure of
a single one of its more than 100,000 connections and components, even for
a millionth of a second, would result in computer misf unction. Yet operating
often on a 24-hour-a-day, 7-day week, SEAC performed for 4,000 hours in
its first 9 months without a malfunction. Besides handling a number of
classified problems for the military services and the Atomic Energy Com-
mission, it carried out computations on electronic circuit design, optical lens
calculations, statistical sorting and tabulating studies for Social Security
Hearings * * * 1948, pp. 350—351. The idea persisted, in NBS Annual Report 1950,
pp. 71—72, and Annual Report 1951, p. 67.
'° C Discussed in Hearings * *
1956 (Apr. 18, 1955), p. 29.
NBS Annual Report 1948, p. 239; Annual Report 1949, pp. 64—65; Hearings * * •
1951 (Feb. 23, 1950), p. 2175; Hearings * * * 1952 (Apr. 10, 1951), pp. 502—504;
interview with Dr. Edward W. Cannon, July 7, 1964.
In 1950 there were no more than six or eight electronic computers in operation. By
1960 over 10,000 of one type or another had been built. Eckert and Mauchly's Electronic
Digital Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC), for the Ordnance Ballistics
Research Laboratory at Aberdeen, was completed in 1950. Between 1951 and 1953
Eckert and Mauchly, at Remington Rand, constructed six Universal Automatic Computers
(UNIVAC), the development and assembly of the first of these commercial
stored-program computers monitored by NBS for the Bureau of the Census. See Office
of Naval Research report, "A survey of automatic digital computers" (Washington,
D.C., 1953).