Using Digital Computers in the Design and Maintenance of New Computers

To conserve manpower and reduce the time needed for designing, assembling, and maintaining new large-scale computers, existing computers have been used to produce design and maintenance data for the new machines automatically. This paper describes some techniques that were devised at the National Bureau of Standards for automatically converting a logical design into detailed wiring plans which specify the actual pin-to-pin connections and other data necessary for assembling, debugging, and maintaining a new machine. Starting from punched-card input transcriptions of the logical design of the new computer, expressed in terms of Boolean algebra, an IBM 704 was programmed to produce 20,000 printed pages of wiring plans, fabrication data, and logical debugging and maintenance manuals.