Synergy User Manual and Tutorial. - THE CORE MEMORY

Synergy User Manual and Tutorial
UNIVAC’s input consisted of 12,800 character per second magnetic tape reader, a 240
card per minute card to tape converter and a punched paper tape to magnetic tape
converter. Its output consisted of a12,800 character per second magnetic tape reader, a
120 card per minute card to tape converter, a 10 character per second character printer, a
Uniprinter (a 600 line per minute high-speed line printer developed by Earl Masterson in
1954) and a 60 word per minute Rad Lab buffer. This was the first machine to use a
buffered memory. It had 5,200 vacuum tubes, 18,000 crystal diodes, 300 relays and
contained a mercury delay line memory that could hold 1,000 words 72 bits in length (11
decimal digits plus sign). The 8 ton, 25 by 50 feet machine consumed 125,000 Watts of
power—31,250 times as much as a desktop computer (the average desktop consumes less
than 400 Watts). It could perform 1,900 additions, 465 multiplications or 256 divisions
per second. The machine also had a character set, similar to a typewriter keyboard, with
capital letters. In 1956 a commercial UNIVAC computer was introduced that used
transistors.
In 1943, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) started the Whirlwind Project,
under the supervision of Jay Forrester, for the U.S. Navy after determining that it was
possible to produce a computer to run a flight simulator for training bomber crews.
Initially, they attempted to use an analog machine but found that it was neither flexible
nor accurate. Another problem was the typical batch-mode computers of the day were
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