MIDAC was the acronym for the Michigan Digital Automatic Computer, a pioneering

digital computer A computer is a machine that can be programmed to automatically carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (''computation''). Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as ''programs'', wh ...

at the

University of Michigan The University of Michigan (U-M, U of M, or Michigan) is a public university, public research university in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States. Founded in 1817, it is the oldest institution of higher education in the state. The University of Mi ...

, the university's first. Work commenced on it in 1951, under collaborative sponsorship of the

Wright Air Development Center Wright is an occupational surname originating in England and Scotland. The term 'Wright' comes from the circa 700 AD Old English word 'wryhta' or 'wyrhta', meaning worker or shaper of wood. Later it became any occupational worker (for example, a ...

and the

United States Air Force The United States Air Force (USAF) is the Air force, air service branch of the United States Department of Defense. It is one of the six United States Armed Forces and one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. Tracing its ori ...

, and the Willow Run Research Center of the Engineering Research Institute at the University of Michigan. The intention was to produce a machine to assist with "the solution of certain complex military problems."

History

MIDAC was patterned after SEAC (Standards Electronic Automatic Computer), built in 1950 for the U.S.

National Bureau of Standards The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into physical sc ...

. The sixth such digital automatic computer at a research university, and the first computer of its kind in the Midwest, MIDAC was a massive installation. It featured 500,000 connections and

vacuum tube A vacuum tube, electron tube, thermionic 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. It ...

s, which required 12 tons of refrigeration to cool. Its main memory was a rotating

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. Many early computers, called drum computers or drum machines, used dru ...

, capable of storing 6,000 "words" of encoded data. The MIDAC went online on June 1, 1953, and was operated by Willow Run's Digital Computation Department under the leadership of John Carr III until 1958, when it was supplanted by the faster Michigan Digital Special Automatic Computer (MDSAC) – an

IBM 650 The IBM 650 Magnetic Drum Data-Processing Machine is an early digital computer produced by IBM in the mid-1950s. It was the first mass-produced computer in the world. Almost 2,000 systems were produced, the last in 1962, and it was the firs ...

– and the Air Force removed the equipment.

ENIAC

Although it was not created there, a piece of the

ENIAC ENIAC (; Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first Computer programming, programmable, Electronics, electronic, general-purpose digital computer, completed in 1945. Other computers had some of these features, but ENIAC was ...

(Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) exists at the University of Michigan. It was developed at the Moore School of Engineering at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. One of nine colonial colleges, it was chartered in 1755 through the efforts of f ...

, and was brought to Michigan in the mid-1960s by professor Arthur Burks, who had served as a principal designer of ENIAC. Burks came to the University of Michigan in 1946 as a professor of philosophy, but went on to study at the Moore School before being drawn into the ENIAC project.

References

{{reflist Vacuum tube computers University of Michigan

History

ENIAC

See also

References