TheBRLESC I (BallisticResearchLaboratoriesElectronicScientificComputer) was one of the last of thefirst-generation electronic computers. It was built by theUnited States Army'sBallistic Research Laboratory (BRL) atAberdeen Proving Ground with assistance from the National Bureau of Standards (now theNational Institute of Standards and Technology), and was designed to take over the computational workload ofEDVAC andORDVAC, which themselves were successors ofENIAC. It began operation in 1962.[1] The Ballistic Research Laboratory became a part of theU.S. Army Research Laboratory in 1992.
BRLESC was designed primarily for scientific and military tasks requiring high precision and high computational speed, such asballistics problems, armylogistical problems, and weapons systems evaluations. It contained 1727vacuum tubes and 853transistors and had amemory of 4096 72-bitwords. BRLESC employedpunched cards,magnetic tape, and amagnetic drum as input-output devices, which could be operated simultaneously.
It was capable of five million (bitwise) operations per second. Afixed-point addition took 5microseconds, afloating-point addition took 5 to 10 microseconds, a multiplication (fixed- or floating-point) took 25 microseconds, and a division (fixed- or floating-point) took 65 microseconds. (These times are including the memory access time, which was 4-5 microseconds.) It was the fastest computer in the world until theCDC 6600 was introduced in 1964.
BRLESC and its predecessor,ORDVAC, used their own unique notation forhexadecimal numbers. Instead of the sequence A B C D E F universally used today, the digits 10 to 15 were represented by the letters K S N J F L, corresponding to theteletypewriter characters on five-trackpaper tape. Themnemonic phrase "King Size Numbers Just For Laughs" was used to remember the letter sequence.
BRLESC II, using integrated circuits, became operational in November 1967; it was designed to be 200 times faster than ORDVAC.[2]
The integrated circuits for BRLESC were produced under an industrial contract, but BRL employees did all the logic design ...
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