Giant brains

Giant brains, or Machines That Think, is by Edmund Callis Berkeley, a consultant in modern technology. The copy is the second printing of February 1950. In the preface the author says the subject is a type of machine that comes closer to being a brain that thinks than any earlier machine, called mechanical brains or sequence-controlled calculators, which handle information with great skill and speed.

One passage describes the Eniac in concrete detail: an accumulator holding ten digits is a set of ten decades, each two inches wide and two and a half feet high, with about twenty kinds of plug-in units that can be swapped if one shows trouble. Numbers have ten decimal digits and a sign. Information enters by punch cards, switches and function tables, and leaves on punched cards or as lights in neon bulbs. A bibliography lists articles on harmonic analyzers, and another passage describes a tape with places for 24 punched holes in each row, each row an instruction.