The BINAC. A product of the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp

THE FIRST STORED-PROGRAMME COMPUTER IN THE US. Very rare sales brochure for Eckert and Mauchly's BINAC, the first operational stored-programme computer in the United States. J. Presper Eckert, together with his partner John Mauchly, invented and constructed the first general-purpose digital computer (the ENIAC) during World War II. After the war he and Mauchly founded the first commercial computer company in the United States, the Electronic Control Co., soon renamed the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. While developing the UNIVAC for the U. S. Census Bureau, Eckert and Mauchly contracted with the Northrop Aircraft Company in southern California to develop and construct a BINary Automatic Computer (BINAC). The contract was signed in October 1947, with Northrop providing $80,000 up front; another $20,000 was due upon delivery of the machine. "Had it been finished on time [i.e., by May 15, 1948] it would have been in contention with the British computers at Manchester and Cambridge as the first working electronic stored-program computer. In reality it ran its first program in the late summer of 1949 and, as a consequence, became the first operational computer in America but not in the world" (Williams, pp. 359-360). With both input and output in base 8 (a compact way of representing binary values), the BINAC's design made it very difficult to use; in addition BINAC's complex and delicate machinery suffered in the delivery from Philadelphia to California, so much so that it was never able to function effectively as a production machine. Published the year BINAC was delivered, this flyer contains the computer's statistics, a brief outline of its elements and general characteristics, coding instructions, and a conversion table comparing decimal, coded decimal, binary, and octal numbers. A full-page illustration shows the various components of the system. The document was likely produced for distribution when the machine was being demonstrated to interested parties. It may be the only document extant that gives the complete instruction set (sixteen instructions) for BINAC. Few copies of this brochure would have been distributed, as only one machine was sold, and Eckert-Mauchly rapidly turned their attention to building UNIVAC. ABPC/RBH list only the OOC copy (Christie's 2005). "In 1948 the NBS [National Bureau of Standards] agreed to go ahead with the development work for UNIVAC and signed a contract. By that time the Eckert-Mauchly people were in a very awkward position. Because of the very limited income they had from the NBS contract over the last 18 months, they had searched around to find some other firm or agency that would be willing to keep the company alive until the UNIVAC development contracts would be awarded. Their search brought them into contact with the Northrop Aircraft Company which agreed to fund the development of a Binary Automatic Computer (BINAC). In October 1947 Northrop signed a contract for the construction of a computer to be finished by May 15, 1948 . "Northrop had envisaged the BINAC as an experimental machine which might become the forerunner of a much smaller airborne guidance system for the Snark missile they had under development. In the end it saw very little use by Northrop; some employees even claimed that although it functioned in the Eckert-Mauchly workshop, it never ran when finally delivered. This has been disputed by a number of Northrop employees who indicate that it did run several small problems after it had been delivered to their California location, but that was never in good enough shape to be used as a production machine. It would appear that a large part of the problem stemmed from the fact that Northrop took delivery in the Eckert-Mauchly workshop in Philadelphia and did not appreciate the fact that shipping a very sophisticated, highly experimental, machine required more than simply building crates and calling in the moving men" (ibid., pp. 359-360). "The BINAC consisted of two.…