"Task 13"

So much for my memory.. Um... ERA were the people who built the "Project 13" machines during WW II. The 1101 used a drum, and built the follow on 11xx machines in the Twin Cites. ref "A Few Good Men From Univac" "From Dits To Bits", etc. should be (from the URL about the ERA Book): In the fall of 1946, ERA received its first major contract from the Office of Naval Research to compile a report on ?High Speed Computing Devices?. This report, which became the definitive study of the infant state of computing, was later published in book form by McGraw Hill. During this project, ERA personnel was given access to classified government reports and worked with computer pioneers John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, inventors of the ENIAC, and John von Neumann, of Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Study. ERA was dependent on government funded cost-plus--fixed-fee contracts. In August 1947, it began work for the Navy on Task 13 - a project to design a general all-purpose stored-program computer. During this project ERA developed the first magnetic storage drum; the technology upon which the next two generations of computers was based. In October, 1950, ERA completed work on the Atlas computer - America's first electronic stored-program computer. The Atlas with its 2,700 vacuum tubes was capable of running twenty-four hours a day with only 10% of the time allotted for maintenance. -- The commercial verison of "Atlas" is the 1101