1940 to 1949: Computing During World War II and the Postwar Era - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 76

Northrup Grumman commissioned EMCC to build a computer for corporate
use, and the result was the Binary Automatic Computer (BINAC). This computer
had two separate processing units, each of which could hold 512 words. Mercury
delay lines were used for memory storage.
Since the computer was commissioned for a client, it can be considered the
world's first commercial computer, but that is really stretching the definition of
“commercial,” which normally implies multiple customers and multiple sales of
the same product. The BINAC was definitely the first contract computer, but only
one was built and there was only one customer.
As examples of how difficult and small computer programs were in this era,
some of the BINAC test programs were each five to seven lines of code, and a
“big” program during testing was 23 lines of code. The largest test program prior
to delivery was 50 lines of code.
The BINAC was delivered to Northrup in September 1949, but it did not work
properly after delivery. Northrup claimed the computer was not packed properly
or was damaged in shipping. EMCC stated that the computer had probably not
been assembled properly by Northrup, since EMCC personnel were not permitted
onsite and assembly was performed by a graduate student without assistance from
EMCC.
Historical Contributions of the Decade
The literature and data on early computers are surprisingly ambiguous for such an
important technology. This is partly due to independent work in a number of coun-
tries where the computer pioneers were unaware of similar work elsewhere. It is
also partly due to the fact that a number of models and upgrades were built, of-
ten using the nomenclature of Mark I, Mark II, Mark III, and so forth. However,
since this nomenclature was used for different computers in different countries, it
is sometimes hard to tell which specific “mark” a reference is citing.
Table 3.1 shows the approximate sequence of digital computer construction
from 1940 to 1950. There are various sources that often provide different timelines
for when these machines were completed, so this table provides only an approx-
imation of when these computers were first activated during this decade.