The BRLESC I (Ballistic Research Laboratories Electronic Scientific Computer) was a first-generation electronic computer built by the US Army Ballistics Research Laboratory (BRL) at Aberdeen Proving Ground with assistance from the NBS, and was designed to take over the computational workload of EDVAC and ORDVAC, which themselves were successors of ENIAC. It began operation in 1962. The Army is the branch of the United States armed forces which has primary responsibility for land-based military operations. ... The US Army Ballistics Research Labatory is at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Aberdeen, Maryland. ... Aberdeen Proving Ground is a United States Army proving ground located in Harford County, Maryland. ... As a non-regulatory agency of the United States Department of Commerce’s Technology Administration, the National Institute of Standards (NIST) develops and promotes measurement, standards, and technology to enhance productivity, facilitate trade, and improve the quality of life. ... Bold text EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer) was one of the earliest electronic computers. ... The ORDVAC or Ordnance Discrete Variable Automatic Computer, an early computer built by the University of Illinois for the Ballistic Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground, was based on the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) architecture developed by John von Neumann. ... ENIAC ENIAC, short for Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer, was the first all-electronic computer designed to be Turing-complete, capable of being reprogrammed by rewiring to solve a full range of computing problems. ... 1962 was a common year starting on Monday (link will take you to calendar). ...

BRLESC was designed primarily for scientific and military tasks requiring high precision and high computational speed, such as ballistics problems, army logistical problems, and weapons systems evaluations. It contained 1727 vacuum tubes and 853 transistors and had a memory of 4096 72-bit words. BRLESC employed punch cards, magnetic tape, and a magnetic drum as input-output devices, which could be operated simultaneously. Ballistics (gr. ... Logistics is the art and science of managing and controlling the flow of goods, energy, information and other resources. ... In electronics, a vacuum tube (American English) or (thermionic) valve (British English) is a device generally used to amplify a signal. ... Photo of transistor types (tape measure marked in centimeters) Transistor in the SMD form factor The transistor is a solid state semiconductor device used for amplification and switching. ... The terms storage and memory refer to the parts of a digital computer that retain physical state (data) for some interval of time, possibly even after electrical power to the computer is turned off. ... A bit (abbreviated b) is the most basic information unit used in computing and information theory. ... In computing, word is a term for the natural unit of data used by a particular computer design. ... The punch card (or Hollerith card) is a recording medium for holding information for use by automated data processing machines. ... Magnetic tape is an information storage medium consisting of a magnetisable coating on a thin plastic strip. ... The Magnetic Drum was invented by G. Taushek in 1932 in Austria. ...

It was capable of five million (bitwise) operations per second. A fixed point addition took 5 microseconds, a floating-point addition took 5 to 10 microseconds, a multiplication (fixed or floating-point) took 25 microseconds, and a division (fixed or floating-point) took 65 microseconds. (These times are including the memory access time, which was 4-5 microseconds.) In computing, a fixed-point number representation is a real data type for a number that has a fixed number of digits after the decimal (or binary or hexadecimal) point. ... A microsecond is an SI unit of time equal to one millionth (10-6) of a second. ... A floating-point number is a digital representation for a number in a certain subset of the rational numbers, and is often used to approximate an arbitrary real number on a computer. ...

External links

• D.K. ARMY ORDNANCE "HISTORICAL MONOGRAPH, ELECTRONIC COMPUTERS WITHIN THE ORDNANCE CORPS"

• BRLESC (different source)

• History of Computing at BRL

• BRL 1964 report, see page 36