The CAB500 was a French transistor-based drum computer, designed at SEA around 1957 by
Alice Recoque.
The computer had an incremental compiler for a language, PAF (
Programmation Automatique des Formules) similar to
Fortran, designed by Dimitri Starynkevitch in 1957-1959. CAB 500's first model was delivered in February, 1961,
and more than a hundred exemplars were built. It had a
magnetic drum
Drum memory was a magnetic data storage device invented by Gustav Tauschek in 1932 in Austria. Drums were widely used in the 1950s and into the 1960s as computer memory.
For many early computers, drum memory formed the main working memory ...
memory of rotating at and could
invert a square matrix of order 25 in half an hour.
The CAB 500 weighed about .
[{{cite web , title=SEA CAB-500 , url=http://www.feb-patrimoine.com/english/sea_cab500.htm , website=FEB-patrimoine]
References
Transistorized computers