NORC (Naval Ordnance Research Calculator)

The NORC was a vacuum powered computer built by IBM for the U.S. Navy and was delivered in Decemeber, 1954. It was one of the most powerful computers of it’s day, using Williams tubes for memory and had a speed of 15,000 operations per second. It sported a total of 9,800 vacuum tubes and 10,000 crystal diodes.It also had 8 magnetic tape units and two printers. At the presentation ceremony it calculated pi to 3089 digits in a new record time of 13 minutes. In 1955 the system was moved to the Naval Proving Ground in Virginia, where it was used until 1968.