Early Computers at Stanford - Stanford CSD History

Please send corrections and updates to Gio Wiederhold, email and to John Sauter . The intent is to list all computers at Stanford up to about 1980, when personal computers became ubiquitous and uncountable. Some major, later equipment can be included. In March of 1953 an IBM CPC arrived at the Electronics Lab. The CPC was composed of three IBM machines that had been made to work together: an IBM 604 or 605 calculating punch, an accounting machine (one of the IBM 400-series) and an IBM 941 auxiliary storage unit which held 16 10-digit signed numbers. Though marketed by IBM, the CPC was actually a combination developed by Northrop Aviation in 1948 for use in flight simulations and for other engineering work. It used mainly relays and some vacuum tubes. Although it provided some storage, the IBM CPC was not a stored-program computer in the modern sense. The mechanical storage was similar to that of an IBM 602 machine. The C

Please send corrections and updates to Gio Wiederhold, email and to John Sauter . The intent is to list all computers at Stanford up to about 1980, when personal computers became ubiquitous and uncountable. Some major, later equipment can be included. In March of 1953 an IBM CPC arrived at the Electronics Lab. The CPC was composed of three IBM machines that had been made to work together: an IBM 604 or 605 calculating punch, an accounting machine (one of the IBM 400-series) and an IBM 941 auxiliary storage unit which held 16 10-digit signed numbers. Though marketed by IBM, the CPC was actually