Originally designed for the US Navy's Bureau of Ships (a cover for the NSA) and called Atlas (after a character[1] in a popular cartoon at the time), the commercial version was renamed the 1101 because it was designed under "Task 13" (1101 is 13 in binary).
This computer was 38 feet long (11.5 m), 20 feet wide (6 m), and used 2700 vacuum tubes for its logic circuits. Its drum memory was 8.5 inches in diameter (21.6 cm), rotated at 3500 rpm, had 200 read-write heads, and held 16,384 24-bit words (a memory size equivalent to 48 KB).
Instructions were 24 bits long, with 6 bits for the opcode, 4 bits for the "skip" value (telling how many memory locations to skip to get to the next instruction in program sequence), and 14 bits for the memory address. Numbers were binary with negative values in one's complement.
The single 48-bit accumulator was fundamentally subtractive, addition being carried out by subtracting the one's complement of the number to be added. This may appear rather strange, but the subtractive adder reduces the chance of getting negative zero in normal operations.
Engineering Research Associates built a third machine for their own offices, with the intention of creating a service for other companies needing computing resources. However this failed and in November 1954 Remington Rand donated the machine to Georgia Tech for a claimed value of $500,000. In November 1958 Georgia Tech upgraded this machine with 4096 words of core memory for a cost of $39,400. This 1101 was still running student jobs in 1961.
