The Wisconsin Integrally Synchronized Computer (WISC) was an early digital computer designed and built at the

University of Wisconsin–Madison The University of Wisconsin–Madison (University of Wisconsin, Wisconsin, UW, UW–Madison, or simply Madison) is a public land-grant research university in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. It was founded in 1848 when Wisconsin achieved st ...

. Operational in 1954, it was the first digital computer in the state. Pioneering computer designer

Gene Amdahl Gene Myron Amdahl (November 16, 1922 – November 10, 2015) was an American computer architect and high-tech entrepreneur, chiefly known for his work on mainframe computers at IBM and later his own companies, especially Amdahl Corporation. ...

drafted the WISC's design as his PhD thesis. The computer was built over the period 1951-1954. It had 1,024 50-bit words (equivalent to about 6 KB) of

drum memory 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 drum ...

, with an operation time of 1/15 second and throughput of 60 operations per second, which was achieved by an early form of

instruction pipeline In computer engineering, instruction pipelining is a technique for implementing instruction-level parallelism within a single processor. Pipelining attempts to keep every part of the processor busy with some instruction by dividing incoming Mac ...

. It was capable of both fixed and

floating point In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic on subsets of real numbers formed by a ''significand'' (a signed sequence of a fixed number of digits in some base) multiplied by an integer power of that base. Numbers of this form ...

operation. It weighed about . The WISC is part of the permanent collection of the

Computer History Museum The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a computer museum in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the Information Age, and explores the Digital Revolution, computing revolution and its impact ...

.CHM
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References

External links

Oral history interview with Gene M. Amdahl.

Charles Babbage Institute The IT History Society (ITHS) is an organization that supports the history and scholarship of information technology by encouraging, fostering, and facilitating archival and historical research. Formerly known as the Charles Babbage Foundation, ...

, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Amdahl starts by describing his early life and education, recalling his experiences teaching in the Advanced Specialized Training Program during and after World War II. Amdahl discusses his graduate work at the University of Wisconsin and his direction of the design and construction of the Wisconsin Integrally Synchronized Computer. Describes his role in the design of several computers for IBM including the STRETCH,

IBM 701 The IBM 701 Electronic Data Processing Machine, known as the Defense Calculator while in development, was IBM’s first commercial scientific computer and its first series production mainframe computer, which was announced to the public on May 2 ...

, 701A, and

IBM 704 The IBM 704 is the model name of a large digital computer, digital mainframe computer introduced by IBM in 1954. Designed by John Backus and Gene Amdahl, it was the first mass-produced computer with hardware for floating-point arithmetic. The I ...

. He discusses his work with

Nathaniel Rochester Nathaniel Rochester (February 21, 1752 – May 17, 1831) was an American Revolutionary War soldier and land speculator, most noted for founding the settlement which would become Rochester, New York. Early life Nathaniel Rochester was the ...

and IBM's management of the design process for computers. He also mentions his work with Ramo-Wooldridge,

Aeronutronic Aeronutronic was a defense related division of Ford Aerospace, owned by Ford Motor Company, and based in Newport Beach, Orange County, California. The Engineering and Research Center campus was located on Jamboree Road at Ford Road, overlookin ...

, and

Computer Sciences Corporation Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) was an American multinational corporation that provided information technology (IT) services and professional services. On April 3, 2017, it merged with the Enterprise Services line of business of HP Ente ...

. * Contains Gene Amdahl's PhD thesis and WISC User's Manual * *Photos: ** ** ** {{compu-stub Early computers One-of-a-kind computers