The 20-bit General Electric GE 210 Data Processor¹ used for banking, utility billing, and inventory at First National Bank of Denver, November 29, 1965. The serial 6-digit decimal machine was designed by Arnold Spielberg² (father of Steven Spielberg) in 1959 based on the earlier ERMA³ (Electronic Recording Machine Accounting) system that used MICR (Magnetic Ink Character Recognition) which revolutionized bank check processing. The computer could decode 124 instructions and used the General Electric Common Language with additions taking 64 µs and multiplications 550 µs. A mechanical document transport picks up magnetically imprinted documents one at a time from items in its feeder, moving the documents past a read head where a magnetic character reader then scans the magnetic ink characters and transmits the information to the central processor, sorts the documents, and inserts each one into the proper pocket. The 4.5 ton mainframe consisted of 9,998 transistors and 39,333 diodes, consumed 50 kW of power, and had 4,000 words of core memory. The buffering system permits simultaneous operation of computation, reading magnetic tape, writing magnetic tape, reading magnetically encoded documents, reading punched tape, printing with online listers and Flexowriters. GE sold 44 of these $225,000 systems from 1960 to 1964.
