The MIDAC (Michigan Digital Automatic Computer) was built beginning in 1951, at the Willow Run Research Center, originally for missile guidance for the BOMARC long range anti-aircraft missile.
Although funded for military purposes, MIDAC was also applied to scientific and industrial problems. Gilbert N. Plass used MIDAC in the mid-50s to perform an early numerical computation of how changing CO2 levels in the atmosphere could affect surface temperatures. And the Argus Camera Company used MIDAC to optimize the design of the Cintagon 50mm f/2.8 lens offered on its 1956 Argus C-44 camera.
In the mid-1950s two-week special courses were offered every August, which used MIDAC to disseminate computer science in its nascent form to researchers from other institutions. The University of Minnesota has notes and schedules for the 1953 course in their Charles Babbage archive.
Sources
- Michigan Report: MIDAC archival video [Flash required] from Bentley Library Michigan Media video archive collection
1955 program from UM TV, with host Dan Witt(?) interviewing professor John Carr. Explanation of "digital" computing, binary notation, programming, paper-tape punching, debugging, and a description of MIDAC's components. "It's a very pretty device; it's colored in blue and maize, the university colors."
In 1951, under collaborative sponsorship from the Wright Air Development Center and the United States Air Force, the Willow Run Research Center of the Engineering Research Institute, University of Michigan began development of the Michigan Digital Automatic Computer (MIDAC) with the intention of producing a machine to assist with “the solution of certain complex military problems.”
- MIDAC automatic computer, technical report UMR4188, 1951
- http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gbell/computer_structures__readings_and_examples/00000229.htm
The MIDAC, Michigan Digital Automatic Computer [Carr, 1956], was constructed on the basis of the design of the SEAC at the National Bureau of Standards. Its instruction code is particularly of interest because it incorporates the index register concept into a three-address binary instruction. Numbers in this machine are (44, 0, 0)2 fixed points. The word length is 45 binary digits with serial operation.
Contains notes and schedules that were intended as an informal summary of the special course. Includes laboratory exercises, answer sheets, explanations of special MIDAC programs, expositions of particular problems and machine techniques, excerpts from texts and articles, and notes from a course taught by John W. Carr III, "Methods in High-Speed Computation." Extended notes from the following instructors are included: Walter F. Bauer, Ralph T. Dames, Glenn W. Graves, Lyman W. Orr, and Norman R. Scott.
Descriptions of MIDAC, in comparison to other research computers of the era:
- Office of Naval Research, Digital Computer Newsletter (Vol. 8, No. 3; pgs 5–6), July 1954 (PDF)
- Office of Naval Research, Digital Computer Newsletter (Vol. 7, No. 4; pgs 6–7), Oct. 1955 (PDF)
From August 1 through 12 [1955], 160 persons attended the University's third annual Special Summer Conference in Digital Computers and Data Processors.
Dr. Carr, a pioneer in computer education in the U.S. and one of its chief missionaries abroad, began in electrical engineering, earning his bachelor's degree from Duke in 1943 and serving as electronics officer aboard the aircraft carrier Boxer during War II. He resumed his education with a master's from MIT in 1949 and took his Ph.D. there in mathematics in 1951. From 1953-57, he was an associate professor at Michigan--teaching the first computer applications courses there--and supervised operations and software of MIDAC at Michigan's Willow Run Research Center. At the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill from 1957 to 1962, he was professor of mathematics and director of the Research Computation Center.
