Described at
Oral-History:Elsie Shutt - Engineering and Technology History Wiki
ethw.org →Link to a page describing this subject · 40,000 chars · not written by Vinony
~4 min read
Encyclopedic overview
5 sectionsContents
- Commissioning
- Details
- See also
- References
- External links
ORDVAC|thumb
The ORDVAC (Ordnance Discrete Variable Automatic Computer), is an early computer built by the University of Illinois for the Ballistic Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground. It was a successor to the ENIAC (along with EDVAC built earlier). It was based on the IAS architecture developed by John von Neumann, which came to be known as the von Neumann architecture. The ORDVAC was the first computer to have a compiler. ORDVAC passed its acceptance tests on March 6, 1952, at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. Its purpose was to perform ballistic trajectory calculations for the US Military. In 1992, the Ballistic Research Laboratory became a part of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “ORDVAC” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.