Evening star., 1953-12-08
By Fronk SortweII, Jr.

Those electronic brains aren't
brains at all-juSt lots of hands.
Today there are 38 of them in
the Hotel Statler-Said to be the
biggest collection ever assembled.
They are exhibits at the Eastern
Computer Conference, being held
thsough Thursday.
There are some that are &C
tual computers-nicknamed elec-
tronic brains by some impress
sionable person with a fair for
headlines.
But mostly they are machines
that function on either side OF
the computer. They take up the
gap between the speed OF the
computer and the SlownesS of:
l. Feeding it data it can
digest.
2. Taking the answers out in
the most usable form.
Aid to Census.
One of the stars of the show
is a feeder-preparing material
for "input" into the Census
Bureaus "UNIVAC"-a set of
electronic hands that will count
you every 10 years, and between
times will figure out a great
many other things about you
If you happen to be a perfect
average.
This machine is "FOSDIC. !"
It's developers-M. L. Greenough,
H. D. Cook and M. Martens of
the Bureau of StandardS-f1g-
ured out the name at lunch one
day Then they got up title
to fit the initialS-Film Optical
Sensing Device for Input to
Computers.
At the bureau yesterday FOS-
DIG made it's bow. The 1900
persons attending the confer
enee will have to go there to
see it.
FOSDIC is five gray cabinets.
It take microf1lm of census data
and scans it with cathode tube
something like TV tube. Up
to $500 marks-either in pencil
or ink-can be read off a To-
millimeter film by FOSDIC in
f1ve-tenthS to nine-tenthS of a
second. They contain the census
data on seven persons. Out of
FOSDIC comes a magnetic tape,
ready to be fed into UNVAC for
the best possible use of that 81
million machine.
Replaces Staff.
FOSDIC, which cost between
100000 and $15O,00O to make,
will cut the 1000 persons who
did its work on the 1850 census
to 100. the Census Bureau figures.
Its developers said they may
some day take out the microf1lm
step. so they can call it "f1leless
FOSDIC."
UNIVAC and the other best
publicized computerS work on a
digital system. To produce their
results they add up numbers.
The other chief type is the
analogous computer. Boeing
Aircraft and Goodyear Aircraft
are exhibiting such machines in
the Statler
They work by analogy. Ger
tain mathematical formulas are
known, such as those that affect
stress on airplanes in flight.
These are put into the machines
electric insides. The relation,
say, of stress to strength in an
existing airplane wing is also
put in.
So, when the Boeing engineers
were designing the B-52, they
could set a dial to what addi-
tional stress would be produced
by an increase in speed or pay
load. Then another dial set
ting would produce information
on how much the new strength
would cost in weight. And the
weight in speed. They test
flew" the B-52 before any proto-
type was built.
The analogous computer
doesn't solve all aerodynamic
problems down to the last degree.
But it gets you into the ball
park" as Alfred C. Block, Boe-
ing technical representative, put
it. You have plane that's safe
to fly. You can take it up and
find out exactly how it acts"
Also on exhibit are machines
that make the computer's data
more usable. The Telecomput-
ing Corp, for instance, has a
small computer designed to do