Crystal Memory

Computing machines are getting brainier and brainier. Latest and brainiest is SEAC (Standards Eastern Automatic Computer), built in Washington by the National Bureau of Standards.

SEAC is completely electronic, with no mechanical parts. Instead of the thousands of expensive and bulky vacuum tubes that serve as "brain cells" in other large computers, SEAC does most of its thinking with 12,800 germanium crystal diodes--modern descendants of the "crystals" in oldtime radios. The diodes are small, trouble-free and quick, allowing the electric pulses of the machine's thinking processes to circulate at the rate of one million per second.

SEAC's most advanced feature is its fast and capacious "memory," as valuable to a calculating machine as to a human brain. Earlier computers stored their recollections (numbers that they might need later) on punched cards, tapes or magnetized surfaces. It took a considerable time to recall them and put them to use. SEAC does its remembering with long tubes filled with mercury. Sound waves coded to represent numbers shoot through the tubes. When they reach the far end, electric repeaters bat them back again. The numbers echo back & forth in the mercury until they are needed in the machine's computations. Then they can be "brought to mind" in 168 millionths of a second.

Other figures are stored in "Williams memory tubes" (rather like television tubes) in the form of electrified dots on the tubes' faces. These memories can be recalled in twelve millionths of a second.

SEAC was sponsored by the Office of the Comptroller of the Air Force and will devote much of its thinking time to dealing with the fog of figures stirred up by modern systems of military logistics. If, in World War III, advanced U.S. air bases get the proper fuel, spare parts, ammunition, etc., at the right time, the pilots can thank SEAC.

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