The context:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILLIAC" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILLIAC</a><p>"ILLIAC I was built at the University of Illinois based on the same design as the ORDVAC. It was the first von Neumann architecture computer built and owned by an American university. It was put into service on September 22, 1952.<p>ILLIAC I was built with 2,800 vacuum tubes and weighed about 5 tons. By 1956 it had gained more computing power than all computers in Bell Labs combined. Data was represented in 40-bit words, of which 1024 could be stored in the main memory, and 12800 on drum memory."<p>The interesting information from the manual is that the computer had 40-bits fixied-point arithmetic, directly calculating only numbers between -1 and +1. If was certainly very demanding programming it.<p>Another interesting detail: the puritans still didn't influence the name of the number system, they write about "sexadecimal" coding, and interestingly use "0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 K S N J F L." Why "K S N J F L"? I don't know.<p>And a really fascinating detail: it was not only punched tapes and stuff: it had a 256x256 pixels CRT as an output device too. Sample on pg. 12-9