In the article A New Speed Record we read
Impatient waiting for a commercial successor to ENIAC, the U.S. National Bureau of Standards opted in 1948 to create its own electronic computer.
The SWAC (Standards Western Automatic Computer) became the world’s fastest computer when completed in 1950, a year before Princeton’s IAS machine.
Colourised photo shows Harry Huskey and the machine labelled NBS Western Automatic Computer:
Harry Huskey had been an engineer on the ENIAC, EDVAC, and ACE computers and worked in the UK with Alan Turing before designing the SWAC. Huskey joined the NBS Institute for Numerical Analysis in 1948.
There’s a video about SWAC and SEAC featuring the people involved, and there’s a transcript too. Some good anecdotes in there:
And, so we wrote this code for structure searching on steroid molecules and fragments thereof and it was an extremely ponderous code, but it ran, you see. And, we did convince the patent office that this was the way to go, which subsequently they did do. But because the code was so ponderous it was something that we hoped you would never have to use. Well in those days the idea of something you that you hope you would never have to use was the H-bomb. So of course we called the code the “H-bomb” code. Well, some how or other the code sheets got misplaced and when it became known that the H-bomb code sheets had been misplaced, the FBI came in. And, of course it took a lot of explaining to explain that this had nothing to do with the H-bomb, it was just a name that we chose to use for the code sheets. But the Patent Office did benefit by this introduction of the use of computers for searching in chemical literature
(I mentioned SWAC in a recent post about improved prime factorising algorithms.)
