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The MISTIC, or ''Michigan State Integral Computer'', was the first computer system at
Michigan State University
Michigan State University (Michigan State, MSU) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in East Lansing, Michigan. It was founded in 1855 as the Agricultural College of the State of Michigan, the fi ...
and was built by its students, faculty and staff in 1957. Powered by
vacuum tube
A vacuum tube, electron tube, valve (British usage), or tube (North America), is a device that controls electric current flow in a high vacuum between electrodes to which an electric voltage, potential difference has been applied.
The type kn ...
s, its design was based on
ILLIAC
ILLIAC (Illinois Automatic Computer) was a series of supercomputers built at a variety of locations, some at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. In all, five computers were built in this series between 1951 and 1974. Some more modern ...
, the supercomputer built at
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Universit ...
, a descendant of the
IAS IAS may refer to:
Science
* Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, United States
* Image Analysis & Stereology, the official journal of the International Society for Stereology & Image Analysis.
* Iowa Archeological Society, Uni ...
architecture developed by
John von Neumann
John von Neumann (; hu, Neumann János Lajos, ; December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, engineer and polymath. He was regarded as having perhaps the widest cove ...
.
History
The interest in developing a computer system at
Michigan State University
Michigan State University (Michigan State, MSU) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in East Lansing, Michigan. It was founded in 1855 as the Agricultural College of the State of Michigan, the fi ...
(MSU) began several years before MISTIC was conceived. In 1954 when MSU was known as Michigan State College (MSC), Professor J. Sutherland Frame of the Mathematics department sent a proposal for a computer donation from the United States Army
Aberdeen Proving Ground
Aberdeen Proving Ground (APG) (sometimes erroneously called Aberdeen Proving ''Grounds'') is a U.S. Army facility located adjacent to Aberdeen, Harford County, Maryland, United States. More than 7,500 civilians and 5,000 military personnel work at ...
. Unfortunately, a federal agency won that donation and the computing vision was not realized at that time.
However, all hope was not lost. In April 1955, Dr. Frame, Dr. Kenneth Arnold, Dr. John Hofman, Francis Martin, Dr. George Swenson Jr., Dr. Lloyd Turk, and Dr. Charles Wells traveled to the University of Illinois to examine the ILLIAC, one of the few university-operated digital computers of its time. When they returned to MSU they made a recommendation to the university to build its own computing facility. The Board of Trustees and MSU president
John A. Hannah
John Alfred Hannah (October 9, 1902 – February 23, 1991) was president of Michigan State College (later Michigan State University) for 28 years (1941–1969), making him the longest serving of MSU's presidents. He is credited with transformi ...
quickly approved it. John Ryder, MSC's Dean of Engineering, former head of Electrical Engineering at University of Illinois had assisted in the construction of the ILLIAC, estimated that MSC could build their ILLIAC equivalent (including hiring two engineers) for $150,000.
The MISTIC
Interests in designing MISTIC as the
ILLIAC
ILLIAC (Illinois Automatic Computer) was a series of supercomputers built at a variety of locations, some at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. In all, five computers were built in this series between 1951 and 1974. Some more modern ...
computer model at MSU was gaining attention from wide areas of academia within the United States, even as far as
Iowa State University
Iowa State University of Science and Technology (Iowa State University, Iowa State, or ISU) is a public land-grant research university in Ames, Iowa. Founded in 1858 as the Iowa Agricultural College and Model Farm, Iowa State became one of the n ...
where
electrical engineering
Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...
Professor Dr. Lawrence Wayne Von Tersch originated. He came to MSU in March 1956 with the interest in the ILLIAC platform due to its large amount of statistical software available on paper tape. After a summer of study of the ILLIAC in Illinois, Dr. Von Tersch and three of his graduate students began building MISTIC in the fall of 1956.
Both ILLIAC and MISTIC were based on the
Institute for Advanced Study
The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), located in Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholar ...
's (
IAS IAS may refer to:
Science
* Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, United States
* Image Analysis & Stereology, the official journal of the International Society for Stereology & Image Analysis.
* Iowa Archeological Society, Uni ...
) computer, known for its revolutionary storage of data and instructions in the same memory. MISTIC and IAS consisted of five sections—input, memory, arithmetic processing, control, and output—setting the standard for at least twelve other computers later built.
MISTIC was built on the fifth floor, Room 500, of the Electrical Engineering Building, which today is the MSU Computer Center. Completed in the fall of 1957, the MISTIC weighed about one ton, filled the whole room, and was capable of storing 1,024 40-bit words (5
KB) in memory. Its anticipation sparked the establishment of the MSU Computer Laboratory in 1956 under the direction of Dr. Von Tersch. It was used in MSU's first computer course taught by computer coding professor Dr. Gerard Weeg. Departments from all over the MSU campus utilized the MISTIC for a myriad of courses and activities.
The post-MISTIC era
MISTIC was the introduction of digital computing to the university, first step in the vast unexplored field. Computers with higher computational power followed within a few years. The vacuum-tube-based MISTIC was replaced by transistor-based
Control Data Corporation
Control Data Corporation (CDC) was a mainframe and supercomputer firm. CDC was one of the nine major United States computer companies through most of the 1960s; the others were IBM, Burroughs Corporation, DEC, NCR, General Electric, Honeywel ...
(CDC)
3600 in 1963,
CDC 6500 The CDC 6000 series is a discontinued family of mainframe computers manufactured by Control Data Corporation in the 1960s. It consisted of the CDC 6200, CDC 6300, CDC 6400, CDC 6500, CDC 6600 and CDC 6700 computers, which were all extremely rapi ...
in 1968, CDC
Cyber 170-750 in 1979 and many more down the years. MISTIC proved to be the cornerstone that changed the way faculty and students perceived computation. The university has owned many mainframes since MISTIC, but none has ever had as magical and inspirational effect as the one that was built on the fifth floor of the Electrical Engineering building, now the Computer Center.
Facts about MISTIC
Facts from the exhibit ''MISTIC Memories: 50 Years of Computing at MSU'', which ran from September 29, 2006 through March 31, 2007 at the
Michigan State University Museum
The Michigan State University Museum most commonly referred to as the ''MSU Museum'' is Michigan State University's oldest museum formed in 1857. It is the state of Michigan's first Smithsonian Affiliate. It was formed to support the work of th ...
:
"MISTIC Memories: 50 Years of Computing at MSU"
Michigan State University Museum, September 29, 2006, accessed 21 May 2013
* MISTIC contained 2,610 vacuum tubes for processing and memory.
* Arithmetic Unit and Storage was in a cabinet that was high and long.
* Magnetic core memory was added in 1960, increasing the memory to 20K, roughly four times what the MISTIC began with.
* Computations were output on a Teletype printer at the rate of 10 characters per second.
* Card Reader could read punch cards at a rate of 200 cards per minute.
See also
* List of vacuum tube computers
Vacuum-tube computers, now called first-generation computers, are programmable digital computers using vacuum-tube logic circuitry. They were preceded by systems using electromechanical relays and followed by systems built from discrete transis ...
References
External links
Celebration of 50 Years of Computing at MSU
MISTIC - 1959
Picture of MISTIC
on page 6
{{Mainframes
IAS architecture computers
Vacuum tube computers
Michigan State University