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The manufacture of components for a system as complex as the computer manufactured by IBM (International Business Machines Corporation) Kingston for use use in the SAGE (Semiautomatic Ground Environment) System requires strict adherence to specified requirements. To meet these requirements, analysis and control of vast numbers of fabricating operations are essential. These operations, although minor in themselves, can jeopardize the effective and specified function of the entire computer by their cumulative shortcomings.

THE International Business Machines Corporation's card-programmed calculator (CPC) is one of the most extensively used automatic digital computers in the world today and has been discussed in several technical articles.1?4 Scientific calculations, engineering problems, and accounting procedures have all been applied to the CPC with success. This flexibility may be attributed to the fact that all of the computer elements of the CPC are wired to plugable terminals on removable plugboards as shown in Fig. 1. Thus, by changing wires on the plugboard, the internal design of the CPC may be altered and optimized for a particular application. The purpose of this paper is to present the features of a new CPC plugboard system developed by the Power Transformer Engineering Section of the General Electric Company primarily for engineering design calculations. This system may be used for any calculations where slide-rule accuracy is adequate.

Because of the need for more accurate and versatile control capabilities than can be obtained economically with continuous systems, discrete filters (digital computers) are being substituted as control elements in many applications. The exact response of linear systems which combine continuous and discrete filters can be obtained for discrete values of time by a series of well-defined mathematical processes. Since these processes require many computations of a repetitive nature to obtain complete response data, manual methods of computing are often not practicable and general-purpose digital computers such as the IBM (International Business Machines Corporation) type 650 are used to assist in the analysis of these systems.

THE Lincoln Laboratory and International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) have, during the past 3 years, worked out the design for a new digital computer which is the central component of a large-scale real-time system. In this system, data from many sources are fed automatically into the computer where they are processed under programmed control. A complete compilation of the real-time situation is made by the computer and presented to operators by means of a special display system. The computer automatically generates control commands for the external environment in response to corrections and command information fed into it by the operators.

IN THE fall of 1950, the University of Wisconsin began research in the design and construction of an automatic electronic digital computer to add to its servomechanism, analogue, and digital computer program. The project was undertaken for two reasons: 1. to obtain an additional research tool to supplement existing computing facilities such as the International Business Machines equipment operated by the university's numerical analysis laboratory and the electrical engineering department's high-speed electronic differential analyzer; and 2. to provide training for both students and staff in the problems of computer design, construction, maintenance, and use.

The design of new electronic computers has become such a complex task that manual methods are no longer adequate. To help design new series of data processing machines now under development, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is using a system of computer programs written for the 704 and 705 data processing machines. Referred to as the ?design mechanization? programs, these computer programs eliminate a large amount of detail work for the design engineer.