BINAC ( Binary Automatic Computer ) is an early electronic computer that was designed for Northrop Aircraft Company by the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC) in 1949. Eckert and Mauchly had started the design of EDVAC at the University of Pennsylvania , but chose to leave and start EMCC, the first computer company. BINAC was their first product, the first stored-program computer in the United States; BINAC is also sometimes claimed to be the world's first commercial digital computer even though it was limited in scope and never fully functional after delivery.
7-504: The BINAC was a bit-serial binary computer with two independent CPUs , each with its own 512- word acoustic mercury delay-line memory . The CPUs continuously compared results to check for errors caused by hardware failures. It used approximately 700 vacuum tubes . The 512-word acoustic mercury delay-line memories were divided into 16 channels, each holding 32 words of 31 bits , with an additional 11-bit space between words to allow for circuit delays in switching. The clock rate
14-436: A bit-serial architecture—they were serial computers . Bit-serial architectures were developed for digital signal processing in the 1960s through 1980s, including efficient structures for bit-serial multiplication and accumulation. The HP Nut processor used in many Hewlett-Packard calculators operated bit-serially. Assuming N is an arbitrary integer number, N serial processors will often take less FPGA area and have
21-416: A production machine. Northrop attributed the failures to it not being properly packed for shipping when Northrop picked it up; EMCC said that the problems were due to errors in re-assembly of the machine after shipping. Northrop, citing security considerations, refused to allow EMCC technicians near the machine after shipping, instead hiring a newly graduated engineering student to re-assemble it. EMCC said that
28-606: A test program (consisting of 23 instructions ) in March 1949, although it was not fully functional at the time. Here are early test programs that BINAC ran: Northrop accepted delivery of BINAC in September 1949. Northrop employees said that BINAC never worked properly after it was delivered, although it had worked at the Eckert-Mauchly workshop. It was able to run some small programs but did not work well enough to be used as
35-510: The fact that it worked at all after this was testimony to the engineering quality of the machine. Previous computers were the darlings of university departments of engineering; the users knew the machines well. The BINAC was going to go to an end user, and so a user manual was needed. Automobile "users" were quite accustomed in those days to doing significant servicing of their vehicles, and "user manuals" existed to help them. The BINAC manual writers took inspiration from those manuals when writing
42-457: The user manual for the BINAC. Bit-serial In computer architecture , bit-serial architectures send data one bit at a time, along a single wire, in contrast to bit-parallel word architectures, in which data values are sent all bits or a word at once along a group of wires. All digital computers built before 1951, and most of the early massive parallel processing machines used
49-498: Was 4.25 MHz (1 MHz according to one source), which yielded a word access time of about 10 microseconds . The addition time was 800 microseconds, and the multiplication time was 1200 microseconds. Programs or data were entered manually in octal using an eight-key keypad or were loaded from magnetic tape. BINAC was significant for being able to perform high-speed arithmetic on binary numbers, with no provisions to store characters or decimal digits. The BINAC ran
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