thumb|The ORACLE being used to design the nuclear reactor core of the APPR-1 reactor

The ORACLE, or Oak Ridge Automatic Computer and Logical Engine, was an early stored-program electronic digital computer built jointly by Argonne National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the early 1950s. Based on the IAS architecture developed by John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, it was fabricated at Argonne under subcontract for use at Oak Ridge, where it was installed and operated until the early 1960s. Its name was chosen as an allusion to the oracles of Greek mythology.

In 1949 Argonne National Laboratory, under Norman Hilberry, Frank Hoyt and Donald Flanders, had already decided to build a copy of the IAS machine for its own reactor computations. When Householder decided in 1950 that Oak Ridge needed a similar machine, he opted to subcontract the work to Argonne, whose engineering group already had the relevant experience. The first program run on the machine after acceptance was a Givens eigenvalue routine written by the mathematician Wallace Givens, and by early 1954 the computer was in full operational use at Oak Ridge. From 1957 the machine was also used by the laboratory's Budget Office, with Hezz Stringfield and Ward Foster adapting it to handle Oak Ridge's annual budgeting and monthly financial accounting. Its early use nonetheless established computing as a standard tool at the laboratory, and ORACLE is conventionally counted among the small group of IAS-derived machines (alongside AVIDAC, MANIAC I, ILLIAC I, JOHNNIAC and others) that propagated von Neumann's architecture to the major American research centres in the early 1950s.

See also

  • AVIDAC
  • IAS machine
  • List of vacuum-tube computers
  • MANIAC I
  • ILLIAC I

References

  • BRL 1961 report