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KF5JRV > TECH 14.05.16 13:30l 26 Lines 1600 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
BID : 2896_KF5JRV
Read: GUEST
Subj: BRLESC I
Path: IW8PGT<CX2SA<N0KFQ<KF5JRV
Sent: 160514/1116Z 2896@KF5JRV.#NWAR.AR.USA.NA BPQK1.4.65
The BRLESC I (Ballistic Research Laboratories Electronic Scientific Computer)
was a first-generation electronic computer built by the United States Army's
Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL) at Aberdeen Proving Ground with
assistance from the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute
of Standards and Technology), and was designed to take over the computational
workload of EDVAC and ORDVAC, which themselves were successors of ENIAC. It
began operation in 1962.
BRLESC was designed primarily for scientific and military tasks requiring high
precision and high computational speed, such as ballistics problems, army
logistical problems, and weapons systems evaluations. It contained 1727 vacuum
tubes and 853 transistors and had a memory of 4096 72-bit words. BRLESC
employed punched cards, magnetic tape, and a magnetic drum as input-output
devices, which could be operated simultaneously.
It was capable of five million (bitwise) operations per second. A fixed point
addition took 5 microseconds, a floating-point addition took 5 to 10
microseconds, a multiplication (fixed or floating-point) took 25 microseconds,
and a division (fixed or floating-point) took 65 microseconds. (These times
are including the memory access time, which was 4-5 microseconds.)
BRLESC and its predecessor, ORDVAC, used their own unique notation for
hexadecimal numbers. Instead of the sequence A B C D E F universally used
today, the digits ten to fifteen were represented by the letters K S N J F L,
corresponding to the teletypewriter characters on five-track paper tape.
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