Computomat

Electronic computers are rapidly becoming the oracles of industry. As machines and processes become more complex, problems can become too involved for quick solution by old methods and too vital for trial-and-error testing. Designing a new product--an electronic tube, for instance --may call for thousands of lengthy calculations. Often a computer can polish the whole thing off in a couple of minutes.

But computers are expensive, and they require specialized mathematicians to feed their problems to them. To make their talents more easily available, Electronics Associates, Inc. of Long Branch, N.J.

this week opened a "computer center" at Princeton. The building is a large stone house built in 1947 by two well-heeled Philadelphia sisters to house a 12 ft. by 14 ft. copy of Rembrandt's Night Watch.

Now the Rembrandt is gone, and the house is stuffed with electronic brains and their human servitors, all available to customers on something akin to a help-yourself automat basis.

Graphic Answer. The main unit, a large analogue computer, is rigged so that it can handle a great variety of jobs.

If a client has mathematicians of his own, he can take home a "patch panel": a metal rectangle containing hundreds of small, marked holes. By connecting the proper holes with plug-in wires, he translates his problem into language that the computer can understand. When the panel is inserted in the Princeton machine, the computer gets to work at once; numbers flash rapidly across a glass screen, and spidery arms push electronic pens up the peaks and down into the valleys of a long graph. A correct reading of the graph tells the answer.

Some of the problems take hours or days, and the client is charged (at $100 an hour) by how long he ties up the computer. If he lacks mathematicians, he may bring his problem to the center, where he can hire consultants to translate it into computer language.

Speed Test. First client of the center was Westinghouse Electric Corp., and its problem was how to design a new kind of transformer. The customary method is to build an experimental model and see how it works when parts of its design are changed slightly. This would cost, Westinghouse figures, about $15,000. The computer can do the same job estimating the effects of different kinds of coils, metals and insulating material for about $4,000.

Most of the industrial answers are highly technical, having to do with aeronautical, chemical or electronic engineering. But they can be as down-to-earth as a speed test on next year's automobile design or a weight test on a design for a suspension bridge. A large soap company is currently making a market survey. When all the data is assembled, it will be reduced to formulas punched into a patch panel and fed to the computer. From the result the soap company hopes to discover which of its products are likely to find a future market and which ones it should plan to drop.

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