10 Facts About IBM SSEC

Watson and Aiken decided to go their separate ways, and IBM SSEC began work on a project to build their own larger and more visible machine.

The noisy IBM SSEC was sometimes called Poppa by the viewing pedestrians.

IBM SSEC was an unusual hybrid of vacuum tubes and electromechanical relays.

The familiar 80 columns of IBM SSEC punched card technology were recorded sideways as one column of the tape.

Seeber had carefully designed the IBM SSEC to treat instructions as data, so they could be modified and stored under program control.

The SSEC was used for calculations by the U S Atomic Energy Commission for the NEPA project to power an airplane with a nuclear reactor.

IBM SSEC room was one of the first computers to use a raised floor, so visitors would not see unsightly cables or trip over them.

The SSEC appeared in the film Walk East on Beacon, which is based on a book by J Edgar Hoover.

IBM SSEC ran until August 1952, when it was dismantled, having been made obsolete by fully electronic computers.

In July 1953 the much less expensive IBM 650 was announced, which had been developed by the same Endicott team who developed the SSEC.