Word: marked
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Some of the speakers won applause, but the real hero of the conference, holding court in the Computation Laboratory up the street, was a machine: the 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...
Inner Memory. What can the 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...
Most of last week's conferees were down-to-earth men who flinch from sensationalism. They hate to hear the "Mark III and its fellows called "mechanical brains." They insist that the machines have no intellect, but merely obey commands...
Other calculator experts (a minority) are not so sure. They admit that even the Mark III is crude compared to a human brain with its billions of cross-connected nerve cells. Yet the Mark III can already beat the human brain at certain tedious tasks. Imaginative scientists can only' guess at what other mental marvels its more efficient descendants will be able to produce...
...upperclass registration number falls below last year's when more than 700 sophomores, juniors, and seniors checked in at Long follow. A record crop of freshmen, however, keeps the total enrollment on a par with last year's mark of 940 students...