computer science

Hollerith Electronic Computer

Hollerith Electronic Computer is a computer science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Hollerith Electronic Computer rather than just read about it. In short: The Hollerith Electronic Computer (HEC) was produced by the British Tabulating Machine Company (BTM) and was based on a design by Professor Andrew Booth of Birkbeck College, London. It was Britain's first mass-produced business computer.

Key takeaways

Hollerith Electronic Computer belongs to computer science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Hollerith Electronic Computer to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Hollerith Electronic Computer from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The Hollerith Electronic Computer (HEC) was produced by the British Tabulating Machine Company (BTM) and was based on a design by Professor Andrew Booth of Birkbeck College, London. It was Britain's first mass-produced business computer. The prototype first worked at the end of 1951.

Origins In 1950 John Womersley, who had previously led the team developing the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), joined the Unit record equipment company, BTM. He recognised that there was a need for smaller inexpensive computers and recruited Andrew Booth as a consultant to develop such a machine. Booth had previously worked for the British Rayon Research Association (BRRA) before moving to Birkbeck College in 1945. The BRRA had sponsored him to develop what became the All Purpose Electronic Computer (APEXC). He needed punched card input and output technologies and struck a deal with BTM, whereby they supplied him with these in return for their copying the machine that he was developing, including its magnetic drum memory. In March 1951, BTM's Dr Raymond 'Dickie' Bird with Bill Davis and Dickie Cox were dispatched to Fenny Compton in Warwickshire where Booth lived and where, in a rotting barn, he was developing the prototype of his machine.

Development

Dr Bird and his team built a copy of Booth's machine in the BTM premises at Icknield Way Letchworth, which they called HEC 1. It was 1.5 m high by 3m wide by 0.5m deep and used simple circuits, with approximately 1000 ex-Government thermionic valves (vacuum tubes) mainly 6J6s which were B7G-based double triodes. The memory consisted of a 5.5 inches (140 mm) diameter, 1 inch (25 mm) wide drum rotating at 3000 rpm containing 32 tracks each storing sixteen 32-bit words giving a total of 2 kilobytes. The drum had a special track from which the electronics were clocked. The machine had an accumulator and a multiplier register which were arranged to allow double length multiplication. As the multiplicand was repeatedly added to the product, it got longer while the multiplier got shorter so that the product could fill the accumulator and then continue into the multiplier register. Multiplication took up to 640ms for a 32-bit multiplier, which needed 32 drum accesses. Subsequently, the design was enhanced with larger capacity drums. A pre-production HEC 2 was exhibited at the Business Efficiency Exhibition at Olympia, London in June 1953 and in 1955, the first production machine called HEC 2M was delivered. Seven or eight HEC 2M systems were delivered to customers who included GE Research Laboratories, Thorn, Esso, MoD Boscombe Down, Royal Aircraft Establishment and RAE, Bedford (they had two for wind tunnel applications) and the Indian Mathematical Institute. The next development was of a machine that was essentially a HEC 2 with a number of enhancements specifically designed for a commercial workload. This became known as the HEC 4. When in 1959 International Computers and Tabulators (ICT) was formed by a merger of the BTM and Powers-Samas, the HEC 4 became the ICT 1201 (1200 series). Some 100 of these machines were sold.

Preservation

The original HEC 1 appears to have spent some time in the ICL company museum before being transferred to the collection of Birmingham museums in 1972. After sometime on display, it was by 2002 in the Birmingham Museum Collection Centre at which point there was a proposal to lend it to Birkbeck College but this fell through. The National Museum of Computing made an approach to borrow the computer in 2014 and the computer was transferred on 12 October 2015. After being cleaned up it was officially unveiled in the presence of Dr Bird in April 2016.

References

Sources Bird, Raymond 'Dickie' (Summer 1999), "BTM's First Steps into Computing", Resurrection: The Bulletin of the Computer Conservation Society, 22, ISSN 0958-7403 Fleming, Stephen (4 April 2016), Britain's first mass-produced business computer, The National Museum of Computing, retrieved 4 April 2016

External links The BTM HEC Paperwork Collection at The ICL Computer Museum. The BTM HOLLERITH Paperwork Collection at The ICL Computer Museum.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Hollerith Electronic Computer

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Hollerith Electronic Computer claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In computer science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Hollerith Electronic Computer before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Hollerith Electronic Computer ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Hollerith Electronic Computer

In research: Hollerith Electronic Computer appears in computer science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Hollerith Electronic Computer in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Hollerith Electronic Computer is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Early British computers, English inventions, Vacuum tube computers, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Hollerith Electronic Computer outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Hollerith Electronic Computer in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Hollerith Electronic Computer means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Hollerith Electronic Computer out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Hollerith Electronic Computer in simple terms?

Why does Hollerith Electronic Computer matter?

Because it connects several computer science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Hollerith Electronic Computer?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Hollerith Electronic Computer.