PHIL: Phil Wolfe
IRV: Irvin Lustig
IRV
Those early computers must have seemed remarkable at the time.
PHIL
I had a real fascination with computing equipment. At Princeton, I made a connection with the Institute for Advanced Study computer project. That was the machine that was built from Von Neumann's specifications. An amazing machine by today's terms. It had a total memory of 1 kilobyte of 40-bit words.
IRV
Do you remember the name?
PHIL
Maniac was one name for it. It was formally known as the Institute for Advanced Study Computer. When you programmed for it, you took punch cards - now called unit records - 80 columns by 12, and you punched your own program in binary on this card.
IRV
With a pencil, basically.
PHIL
No, a knife-hole punch. It had 0 to 12 on it, and every time you punched, the card moved over a line. You wrote your program, fed it into the machine, and waited to see what happened. It was a fascinating process. Even at the time, it wasn't very advanced.
When I came to Rand Corporation in 1957, I had to upgrade my understanding of computers. The IBM 704 had just appeared. There was a homegrown machine called Johnniac that was one of the first transistorized computers. And I worked with that quite a bit.
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