Word: bigs
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...cold and sound as a dollar. The trouble was that during his long wait on the shelf, Citation had developed a brood mare's belly, the neck of a bull and a rump like the back of a taxicab. Around the barn, the standing joke is that the "big horse" must have been eating from the same trough with Jake Hizar, the fat (264-lb.) foreman. To pare Citation down to racing weight, Ben Jones is giving him a double dose of work-one gallop at 6 a.m. and another an hour and a half later...
Even so, Ben does not expect to have Citation ready to roll until winter. Casually, Ben adds, "We'll need him for those big stakes in California." Ben could afford to be casual about that announcement, but to other horsemen with an eye on the $100000 Santa Anita Handicap and sundry $50,000 prizes, Ben's words were big, solemn news...
...Mark III Computer, built by Harvard for the Navy at a cost of $500,000. From the front, the Mark III looks like a giant radio panel, with a clean, serene dignity. But behind the panel hides a nightmare of pulsing, twitching, flashing complexity. Thousands of metal parts, big & little, all polished like costume jewelry, compete in frenetic activity. They hum and clack and chirp and roar like a hive of mechanical insects. Among them glow the filaments of 4,500 vacuum tubes, and between them run skeins of wire, 100 miles in all, with 400,000 soldered connections...
...Mark III do? For one thing, it can multiply two 16-digit numbers in a little more than twelve one-thousandths of a second. But this prodigious speed gives little idea of the machine's talents. Its strong point is its "inner memory." This "memory" consists of nine big aluminum cylinders revolving up to 7,200 r.p.m. Their surfaces are coated with black magnetic material. Huddled around them are staggered rows of little brass blocks enclosing electromagnets. When a brief electric impulse flashes through an electromagnet, it prints a dot of magnetism on the spinning cylinder's surface...
...Mark III Computer, built by Harvard for the Navy at a cost of $500,000. From the front, the Mark III looks like a giant radio panel, with a clean, serene dignity. But behind the panel hides a nightmare of pulsing, twitching, flashing complexity. Thousands of metal parts, big & little, all polished like costume jewelry, compete in frenetic activity. They hum and clack and chirp and roar like a hive of mechanical insects. Among them glow the filaments of 4,500 vacuum tubes, and between them run skeins of wire, 100 miles in all, with 400,000 soldered connections...