The continuing adventures of NORC after it was built
at Columbia University's Watson Lab...
NORC at Dahlgren
More about the Russian erasure incident, relayed by Susan L. Harrison, the
daughter of Mary Louise McKee (pictured below): "They received a new device,
placed behind the console, called a Stromberg-Carlson Cathode Ray Printer.
It created output on the CRT and on paper. New codes were added to NORC's
instruction set to plot data to the CRT using Cartesian coordinates. When
Mother's group learned that four Soviets were scheduled to visit, they
decided to display a greeting to show off the new device. Mother plotted
each character in the Russian alphabet in coordinates and wrote a program to
allow selection of characters to send to the screen. (Was this the first
TrueType font?) She was allowed to do this work but only on her own time,
after business hours. She sought help in composing the message from Captain
Utgoff, but they had trouble deciding on the correct word to use for
"computer." They changed their mind after composing the greeting and forgot
to fix the article's gender, producing a grammatical error. When one of the
Soviets saw the mistake, he whipped out his eraser and tried to correct it
on screen."
"As a side note Marvin Maxwell, another employee at Dahlgren, was explaining
the NORC to the visitors and bragging on its capabilities. They asked why
there was only one, and he replied simply 'money.'"
