You know you're from Maine when you can drive from Paris to China in under 2 hours
The RCA BIZMACą was a very large $4.5 million automatic electronic computer made by Radio Corporation of America and installed at the Detroit headquarters of the U.S. Army Ordnance Tank-Automotive Command in 1956. The gargantuan system had 220 units of 19 different types of equipment. Noted for their pioneering work in transistors, RCA nevertheless decided to build six vacuum tube computers instead, the largest vacuum tube computer of its time, occupying 1900 m˛ of floor space with 30,000 tubes, 70,000 diodes, and 35,000 magnetic cores, consuming 0.746 megawatts of power, 500 kW of which are strictly for cooling, and weighing 12 tonnes. With 4,096 7-bit characters of core memory, 18,000 of magnetic drum memory˛, and 182 fixed (non-removable) tape drives used to manage 100,000 inventory records of OTAC's world-wide stock control program of automotive parts manifests required for the Army's Military Assistance Program as well as replacement parts for military combat and transport vehicles. An odd feature of the BIZMAC I was that it had mostly "permanently" mounted tape drives so no constant mounting and dismounting individual tapes was needed.
The tape drives.
It is amazing to us how many oil derricks there once were in the Oklahoma City, Oklahoma city limits. This is an aerial photo that shows the Oklahoma State Capitol Building (center foreground) and looks northeast across a forest of oil drilling derricks and storage tank farms towards Northeast High School at NE 31 and Kelley (upper right corner). Staff photo taken 2/9/1938. Route 66 ran right by the Capitol Building in those days.