The "Randall Tire Co." gas station and garage in Vinita, Oklahoma on old Route 66, circa the 1930s. It is at 237 S. Wilson St. and was built in 1931. It was a Wilco, H. F. Wilcox, Tulsa gas and oil company gas station. The gas then was 11 cents per gallon. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1995. It has a distinctive facade with irregular stone that gives it a castle-like appearance, with a sawtooth parapet. Its windows are framed with bricks. We believe it is currently an auto parts store.
Historically, Vinita is the second oldest town in Oklahoma and was the first in the State to have electricity. It is called "America's Crossroads" US highways 60, 66, and 69 crossed Vinita. Some see Vinita as Will Rogers hometown, but he was born close by on the Cherokee Nation near present-day Oologah, OK. He did go to college at Willie Halsel College in Vinita but made Claremore, OK his home.
The RAYDAC (Raytheon Digital Automatic Computer)
Technician performing a memory integrity check during the construction phase of the 30-bit RAYDAC computer on August 2, 1952. Designed for use in Project Hurricane, this four address binary machine built by Raytheon was installed in July 1953 at the Naval Air Missile Test Center at Point Mugu, California. Cooled by liquid freon, the 5,200 vacuum tubes consumed 28 kW of power. It had 18,000 crystal diodes, 1,152 words of 36-bit 305 µs acoustic delay line memory, and 630 relays. With a 3.77 MHz clock and 54-bit instructions, addition took 38 µs, multiplication 240 µs, and division 375 µs, excluding the memory-access time, with 5-bit check numbers (Hamming type error detection) for self-checking arithmetic. The 18.6 m² computer required 4 operators, 14 maintenance, 25 mathematicians, 5 clerks, and had 4 coders in training. According to the specs, the purpose of the machine was data reduction and general large-scale computations.