Programming Paradigms

Paradigms Past: Behind SWAC

It is an evanescent distinction to be called "the fastest computer in the world." Scores of computers have earned that title over the past half-century, and some have held it for a very brief time. In 1950, the fastest computer in the world was the SWAC, the Standards Western Automatic Computer, the first computer built in California. (Hence the "Western." The "Standards" part owed to the fact that SWAC was built for the National Bureau of Standards.) Harry Huskey, the head of the team that built SWAC, had lived through Ohio winters and British winters (made somewhat brighter by the opportunity to work under the legendary Alan Turing), and he thought that California winters might be an improvement. It seemed to him that the West Coast would be a fine place to build a computer, and NBS had a lab at UCLA. Well, they had an empty room, anyway. SWAC, whose power supply alone took up a whole wall, needed a room.

SWAC was built when transistors, operating systems, and programmers were unavailable, unreliable, or optional, and was built and programmed without benefit of any of the above. It was retired in 1967, when all three of these innovations were coming to be regarded as necessary. Or unavoidable. In the meantime SWAC did a lot of useful work for NBS, and provided the material for a lot of reminiscences by those who worked on it. One of the SWAC experts, Alex Hurwitz, found the then-largest known prime using SWAC. It saw service as an I/O device for an IBM 7094 and as an interactive personnel computer. And it served other purposes. One system operator remembers fondly the afternoon naps he took in the warm, dark spaces behind the bays of the huge SWAC.

Try doing that with your Gateway PC.

-- M.S.