Giant Brains, or Machines That Think by Edmund C Berkeley, Consultant in Modern Technology, 1949. Harvard's IBM Automatic Sequence-Controlled Calculator
Compact! ...The machine (see Figure 1) is about 50 feet long, 8 feet high, and about 2 feet wide. It consists of 22 panels; 17 of them are set in a straight line, and the last 5 are at the rear of the machine...
Accurate! ...Numbers in the machine regularly consists of 23 decimal digits. The 24th numerical position at the left in any register contains only 0 for a positive number and only 9 for a negative number. Nines complements (see Supplement 2) are used for negative numbers...
Runs like the wind! ...The time required in the machine for adding, subtracting, transferring, or clearing numbers is 3/10 of a second. This is the time of one machine cycle or of reading one coding line. Multiplication takes at the most 6 seconds, and an average of 4 seconds. Division takes at the most 16 seconds, and an average of 11 seconds...To calculate a logarithm, an exponential, or a sine to the full number of digits obtainable by means of the automatic subroutine takes at the most 90, 66, and 60 seconds respectively...
Cost effective! ...The cost of the machine was somewhere near 3 or 4 hundred thousand dollars, if we leave out some of the cost of research and development...A staff of 10 men, consisting of 4 mathematicians, 4 operators, and 2 maintenance men, are needed to keep the machine running 24 hours a day...If a capital value of $500,000 is taken as equivalent to $50,000 a year, then the cost of the machine in operation 24 hours a day is in the neighborhood of $150 a day or $6 an hour...