In this General Electric promotional photo from 1953 Mrs. Connie Hodgson, of Syracuse, N.Y., displays her figure and figures after taking on GE’s Office of Air Research Automatic Computer (OARAC) in a mathematical challenge. She was one of a half dozen intelligent adults multiplying 8,645,392,175 by 8,645,392,175.
Mrs. Connie Hodgson of Syracuse, New York, one of six adults who pitted their multiplication skills against General Electric’s OARAC. The center section of the OARAC contains the control panel with two early-type vacuum column tape drives, flanked on either side by rows of plug-in turrets containing 1200 vacuum tubes of 12 different types and 7,000 diodes.
It was on its way to the U.S. Air Force, but before it left, it showed off its skills by competing against the human contestants in calculating 8,645,392,175² to get the answer of 74,742,805,859,551,230,625. None of the human contestants got the right answer and none of the answers coincided. Mrs. Hodgson came the closest and she is pointing to the spot where she forgot to carry a 1, making her final answer be off by a trillion.
The humans took between 4 and 8 minutes to get the wrong answer. OARAC was much faster, crunching the numbers in about 4 ms. It was a ten digit BCD (Binary Coded Decimal) two address machine with 21 instructions operating on a 150 kHz clock and using 23 kW of power. A separate cabinet (not shown) contained a 10,000 word magnetic drum storage. Approximate cost of the system $185,000.
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