Two Thousand Words and Two Thousand Ideas-The 650 at Carnegie

Abstract

Prior to the first commercial drum computers (see Carr and Perlis 1954), only a few universities building computers under defense contracts had access to electronic digital computers. Other equally good commercial drum machines were available, but it was the IBM 650 that opened the tool of digital computation to American universities. A major contributing cause was the generous and farsighted grant of 60 percent rental provided by IBM. Along with the computer came opportunities and problems: How, where, and by whom would it be administered? What were the important problems the computer would help to solve? Where did it fit into the educational and research environment? How would it be paid for? Who would use it, and how would it be used? At Carnegie Tech (now CMU) the 650 arrived in