December 28, 1956
FIRST ELECTRONIC BRAIN IN GREECE: (From a report by GKV, probably Georgios K. Venizelos): The first electronic brain has arrived in Greece – for the National Bank of Greece and Athens – and was shown during the First Panhellenic Accounting Conference held recently at the Economic and Commercial Science University. Its 1,200 valves and 52 kilometers of cable are insufficient to give even an imperfect picture of the detailed technical marvel of its construction. The main «brain» is a rectangular-shaped machine, 1.5 meters high, 0.40 meters wide and 1.5 meters long. The machine contains the equivalent of the human wisdom needed to make 240,000 calculations – additions, subtractions, divisions and multiplications – an hour for up to 13-digit figures. This means 4,000 calculations a minute or about 66 per second… On a board inside the machine, the operator positions the ends of various cables in the appropriate receptors and thereby gives it the necessary instructions… In a second apparatus of about the same dimensions, punched cards are placed, the holes in the cards representing the numbers which the computer is to work with…
