Texas, 1913...
Photographer's Caption
Millie, four years old and Nellie five years old. Cotton pickers on a farm near Houston, Millie picks eight pounds a day and Nellie thirty pounds. This is nearly every day. Home conditions bare and bad. Location: Houston [vicinity], Texas...
Source
National Child Labor Committee Lewis Hine photographer
A Rolls Royce being delivered by a 2 horsepower vehicle back in the old days.
The IBM Naval Ordnance Research Calculatorı (NORC) was the world's most powerful computer from 1954 to 1963. A first-generation vacuum tube computer built between 1950 and 1954 for the U.S. Navy by American astronomer Wallace Eckert² (designer of the SSEC³) at IBM's Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory⁴, Columbia University, New York City. Numerical analyst and programmer Faith Lillibridge running a lunar orbital calculation. The machine went into service at the Naval Proving Ground in Dahlgren, Virginia. The 138 kW machine was powered by a 1 MHz system clock the arithmetic speed was 15,000 multiplications per second, storage was on eight 3-million word 4-track magnetic tape machines with transfer rates of 70,000 characters/sec from 510 cpi density media. The 2000 words of random access memory was supplied by a bank of 264 Williams-Kilburn electrostatic memory tubes⁵ with fast 8 µs access times. The array of tiny CRT based console readouts showed decimal display of register contents and provided floating point notation and operation. NORC was a three-address machine ("multiply A times B and store the result in C"). It was programmed directly in machine language; assemblers came later. In 1958, the CRT memory was converted to a 20,000-word 8 µs ferrite core memory. In the six months between NORC's completion and its delivery to the Navy, Professor Eckert used it to work on the problem of the position of the moon by computing the ephemerides directly from Ernest W. Brown's lunar theory⁶ equations. The task was immense involving some 1650 trigonometric terms yet the accuracy of the results was so good that after a decade of analysis on the data, in 1965 he was able to correctly show that there was a concentration of mass near the lunar surface, now known as a lunar mascon⁷. NORC was also used to compute the orbits of other celestial bodies, including the most precise orbit of the Earth for the 1920-2000 period. The machine remained in service until 1968. The Asteroid "1625 The NORC" was named after this historic machine.
NORC's arithmetic and control banks consisting of removable plug-in units containing vacuum tubes, resistors, condensers, and crystal diodes.
Word size: 16 decimal digits + check digit (64 + 2 bits)
Two universal registers, one million digits per second
Three address/index registers
Add time: 15 µs
Multiply: 31 µs
Divide: 227 µs