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Bogart

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This page continues the documentation of the computers at Carnegie-Mellon University  in the 1960's. You can click on the links above to learn about some of the other computers.

Unisys History Newsletter

Volume 3, Number 4
August 1999

Sperry Rand Military Computers 1957-1975

by George Gray

Although many of the computers of the 1940s were developed as military projects, the use of vacuum tubes made them too big and unreliable for incorporation into actual weapons systems. The Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation built the BINAC in 1949 for Northrop Aircraft, but no one seriously expected it to be put into an airplane. The massive SAGE (semi-automatic ground environment) system built by IBM during the 1950s for the North American air defense system was for command and control, not for missile guidance. When vacuum tubes were replaced by transistors, it became possible to have computers of smaller size and greater reliability. The transistor was invented at Bell Laboratories in 1948, but it took several years of development to become suitable for use in computers. Bell Labs built the first transistor computer, the TRADIC (Transistor Digital Computer), for the Air Force in 1954. It used 700 point-contact transistors and 10,000 germanium diodes. (A diode is an electronic device which allows current to flow in only one direction.) Both of the two major computer development groups (St. Paul and Philadelphia) at Sperry Rand became involved in early transistor computer projects. Philadelphia became embroiled in the long and costly LARC supercomputer project for the Atomic Energy Commission. St. Paul, building on its early work for the Navy, became heavily involved in military projects.

Bogart

St. Paul's original customers, the nation's cryptologists at the National Security Agency, wanted machines more powerful and versatile than the Atlas I (UNIVAC 1101) and II (UNIVAC 1103) to process text and look for patterns, a task which they called data editing. This led to a secret project for the Bogart computer, a code name which supposedly referred to a then famous newspaper editor, John B. Bogart. At other times the computer was referred to as the X308. Once the computer was completed the secrecy was not so great as to preclude a presentation on it at a 1957 Association for Computing Machinery conference in Los Angeles. The design team was led by Seymour Cray. The processor logic circuits did not use transistors, but a combination of diodes and magnetic cores, so it can be viewed as a further development of the MAGTEC. The instruction word was made up of a six-bit operation code, a three-bit field to indicate the use of index registers, and a 15-bit memory address. The memory address was in turn composed of a 12-bit address followed by three bits which gave the capability of addressing any of the three 8-bit characters in the word (partial-word addressing). There were three arithmetic registers and seven index registers. The Bogart had 4096 words of 24-bit core memory, the maximum which could be addressed in 12 bits. The memory system was designed by Cray and Sidney Rubens of St. Paul in conjunction with Jacob Randmer of Norwalk and was manufactured at Norwalk. The Bogart's central processing unit weighed 3000 pounds and occupied 22 square feet of floor space, a considerable reduction in size and weight from comparable vacuum tube machines. The prototype Bogart was completed in September 1956 and tested for ten months. The four production models of the Bogart were delivered between July 1957 and January 1958. Later the NSA wanted another one, so the prototype model was given some finishing touches and delivered in December 1959. It was used in ROB ROY, an early NSA test of the remote job entry (RJE) concept. After he left Sperry Rand in late 1957, Cray used much of the logic design from the Bogart in his first computer at Control Data Corporation, the 1604, which was completed in January 1960.

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Pat Stakem wrote:
"My understanding was that the Dept. Head (and I can't remember his name, preceded Jordan) had this thing for surplus stuff, and that's why we had the Bogart, the Athena, the big lathe that broke the granite steps, etc.

This was core memory unit that I, Mark DiVecchio, tried to add to the Athena. It was my senior project. It never worked. The core, IIRC, was from the Bogart. Photo taken about 1971. I am somewhat amazed that this project sat, virtually untouched, from spring of 1970 until I took this photo and it probably remained untouched until Glenn Sembroski diassembled the Athena to ship to the Smithsonian.

From the Bogart Programmers Manual:

1. Core Storage
× This storage can retain 4096 24-bit words, a total of 98,304 bits of information
× The Magnetic-core storage contains 24 planes. Each 10 inch plane is a 64 by 64 square array of 406 cores. Three of the four wires running through each core write information into the core and the fourth wire senses whether a 1 or a 0 is stored in the core.
× If the core is magnetized in one direction, a 1 is stored in it; and if it is magnetized in the reverse direction, a 0 is stored in it. Information read out by applying a current to the two read-out wires drives the core into its zero state. If a 1 is stored in the core, the magnetic direction-change induces a voltage in the read-out wire. By sensing the voltage on the read-out wire, it is possible to determine the previous magnetic state of the core.
× Since the read-out wire sets the core to the zero state, it is necessary for the memory circuits to restore the core to a one-state. If it contains a 1, this is the regeneration portion of the storage cycle. The total storage cycle of read-out and information regeneration takes 20 microseconds per word.


Bogart


Photo from the   Bogart Programmers Manual. The computer was supposedly named after John B. Bogart, city editor of The (New York) Sun. This was a reference to the Bogart's primary function - "data editing", what is now called data mining.
When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.
John B. Bogart
(1848 - 1921)
From:    Al Herb <alherbme.com>
Subject:    Re: The Bogart Computer
Date sent:    Mon, 22 Feb 2021 14:05:25 -0500

The older Bogart photo was actually the ROB ROY as described elsewhere.




Emails and photo from Al Herb


From:    Al Herb <alherbme.com>
Subject:    The Bogart Computer
Date sent:    Mon, 8 Feb 2021 20:01:23 -0500

I got my feet wet on the Bogart around 1962 at NSA. They went on to have another rendition of that (Bogart 2) which was essentially 4x the capacity of the original. It had “quadrants” which represented 1 Bogart per quadrant to a total of a 16K words machine. I personally drove the nails into the crate that reportedly went to the museum in DC but don't know if the crate was ever opened. Bogart 1 did better work than the Univac 1108 (for its job) so the 2 was built.

I also worked on the 360, 1401, 1604, (just saw the 704 and 705), and MANY early computers including Cray.

Today, I’m a Mac freak (starting with Apple 2 then moving to the IIC for the NASA Hubble Program). Uh, I was a DEC employee for 5 years too.

Al
Al,

Thanks for your email.

You probably noticed that all that we used of the Bogart was the Frieden Flexowriter and the 4K core memory.

Do you have any documentation on the Bogart? I would especially like to read about the operaton of the logic circuits which, according to the writeup I have, used only diodes and magnetic cores.

I've copied this email to my Athena Group mailing list. There might be questions for you.

Mark
At one time, I championed Project Athena (long gone) while at DEC and worked with Steve Lerman (?).  Yeah I used the Freidden but all of your observations are correct. I was also trained by Cecil Phillips.

It did not use vacuum tubes to implement logic (however, there were a small number of vacuum tubes used for clocking.One of them nearly blew up in my face
Bogart cracked Soviet code many years ago

Al
From:    Pat Stakem <pstakemgmail.com>
Date sent:    Tue, 9 Feb 2021 10:41:51 -0500
Subject:    Re: The Bogart Computer

The Bogart was designed by Sperry Rand in St. Paul, MN for the NSA. It had 4096 words of 24-bit memory, implemented in core. The “small, compact” CPU weighed 3,000 pounds, and covered 20 square feet of floor space. The Bogart design team was headed by Seymour Cray. The prototype was completed in September of 1956. There were four production models built after that. It did not use vacuum tubes to implement logic, but a combination of diodes and magnetic cores, to reduce power. It had 57 instructions for “manipulating data...and performing analytic, counting, and arithmetic operations.”

The computer was supposedly named after John B. Bogart, city editor of The New York Sun. This was a reference to the Bogart's primary function - "data editing", what is now called data mining.

Instruction Book for Bogart Computing System, Navy Model CXPX, 12 volumes, December 1957, Remington Rand Univac, Dept. of the Navy, Bureau of Ships, Contract NObsr 63010, Task 39.
Date sent:    Mon, 8 Feb 2021 23:00:07 -0500 (GMT-05:00)
From:    "J. Chris Hausler" <jchauslerearthlink.net>
Subject:    Re: The Bogart Computer

Hi Mark,

To my knowledge the design used magnetic amplifiers for logic circuit.  Univac (actually ERA) used them in some designs and I recall reading somewhere that when the development that led to the Athena was started there were two parallel paths, one using transistors for the switching elements and one using magnetic amplifiers.  Obviously the transistor approach won and the development of the magnetic amplifier version was terminated.  Just looking around I've cut a section from the Wiki page on magnetic amplifiers as well as attached some links I found to documentation on the Bogart and other NSA machines.

Magnetic amplifiers were widely studied during the 1950s as a potential switching element for mainframe computers. Like transistors, mag amps were somewhat smaller than the typical vacuum tube, and had the significant advantage that they were not subject to "burning out" and thus had dramatically lower maintenance requirements. Another advantage is that a single mag amp could be used to sum several inputs in a single core, which was useful in the arithmetic logic unit (ALU) as it could greatly reduce the component count. Custom tubes could do the same, but transistors could not, so the mag amp was able to combine the advantages of tubes and transistors in an era when the latter were expensive and unreliable.

The principles of magnetic amplifiers were applied non linearly to create magnetic digital logic gates. That era was short, lasting from the mid-1950s to about 1960, when new fabrication techniques produced great improvements in transistors and dramatically lowered their cost. Only one large-scale mag amp machine was put into production, the UNIVAC Solid State, but a number of contemporary late-1950s/early-1960s computers used the technology, like the Ferranti Sirius, Ferranti Orion and the English Electric KDF9, or the one-off MAGSTEC.

https://www.governmentattic.org/3docs/NSA-HGPEDC_1964.pdf
https://sites.google.com/site/marksbench/home/the-univac-bogart-cxpk-computer
https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/about/cryptologic-heritage/historical-figures-publications/publications/technology/
     cryptologys-role-in-the-early-development-of-computer-capabilities-in-the-united-states.pdf?ver=2019-08-07-124403-587

73, Chris


Links


Bogart Programmers Manual  (7+ MB)

Bogart Information

Manuals at bitsavers.org:  http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/univac/military/bogart/
This site prepared and maintained by Mark DiVecchio

email :  markd@silogic.com

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