Fast Student

The student put to the test at the University of Illinois was 8 1/2 ft. tall, 10 ft. wide at the shoulders, and packed with green-faced cathode-ray tubes and little red neon lights. The name was ORDVAC (Ordnance Variable Automatic Computer), and ORDVAC proved remarkably handy with figures.

While officers from Army Ordnance, which owns ORDVAC, watched with admiration, the Illinois professors who built the machine fed problem after problem into its twinkling innards. ORDVAC added numbers at the rate of 10,000 per second. It finished twelve-digit problems in multiplication (e.g., 428,945,437,246 times 342,873,937,895) in one thousandth of a second. It did complex problems that required it to "remember" elaborate sets of instructions. It "generated" 352 random numbers and manipulated them in the subtle ways that delight mathematicians. One endurance test, involving floods of figures, took twelve hours. Every 45 seconds, ORDVAC reported smugly that progress was being made.

Leading feature of ORDVAC is its capacious and accurate memory, as important to an electronic computer as to a human brain. ORDVAC's memory dwells in 40 cathode-ray tubes, which look like small television tubes. On the face of each flash 1,024 glowing green dots, and at each of these positions a bit of information can be stored electrically. When ORDVAC needs such recollections, it can extract them from the tubes in 36 millionths of a second. No other computer's memory is both so large and so fast.

Like other electronic computers, ORDVAC is comparatively tongue-tied--like a bright child who won't show off before company. It does its mathematical feats much faster than it can report them. In two seconds, for instance, it can calculate the cubes of all numbers from i through 2,000, but it takes an hour and a quarter to write down the answers on an electrically operated typewriter. Professor Ralph E. Meagher and his staff hope to make the typewriter run five times as fast. Even so, ORDVAC will not be able to express itself freely.

ORDVAC was considered to have passed the final exam. It will soon be moved to the Army's ballistics research laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, where formidable problems on guns, guided missiles, etc. are awaiting attention. In two weeks of work, ORDVAC's creators estimate, it can solve a problem that would take a human equipped with a standard desk calculator more than 1,000 years.

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