BOGART(ID:6885/)

Bogart

St. Paul's original customers, the nation's cryptologists at the National Security Agency, wanted machines more powerful and versatile than the  Atlas I (UNIVAC 1101) and II (UNIVAC 1103) to process text and look for  patterns, a task which they called data editing. This led to a secret project  for the Bogart computer, a code name which supposedly referred to a then famous  newspaper editor, John B. Bogart. At other times the computer was referred to as  the X308. Once the computer was completed the secrecy was not so great as to  preclude a presentation on it at a 1957 Association for Computing Machinery  conference in Los Angeles. The design team was led by Seymour Cray. The  processor logic circuits did not use transistors, but a combination of diodes  and magnetic cores, so it can be viewed as a further development of the MAGTEC.  The instruction word was made up of a six-bit operation code, a three-bit field  to indicate the use of index registers, and a 15-bit memory address. The memory  address was in turn composed of a 12-bit address followed by three bits which  gave the capability of addressing any of the three 8-bit characters in the word  (partial-word addressing). There were three arithmetic registers and seven index  registers. The Bogart had 4096 words of 24-bit core memory, the maximum which  could be addressed in 12 bits. The memory system was designed by Cray and Sidney  Rubens of St. Paul in conjunction with Jacob Randmer of Norwalk and was  manufactured at Norwalk. The Bogart's central processing unit weighed 3000  pounds and occupied 22 square feet of floor space, a considerable reduction in  size and weight from comparable vacuum tube machines. The prototype Bogart was  completed in September 1956 and tested for ten months. The four production  models of the Bogart were delivered between July 1957 and January 1958. Later  the NSA wanted another one, so the prototype model was given some finishing  touches and delivered in December 1959. It was used in ROB ROY, an early NSA  test of the remote job entry (RJE)concept. After he left Sperry Rand in late  1957, Cray used much of the logic design from the Bogart in his first computer  at Control Data Corporation, the 1604, which was completed in January 1960.