Now FERDY digests 10,000 figures each second.

By JOHN SLEIGHT
Our Education Correspondent

FERDINAND, Durham University’s electronic brain, will soon be “thinking” at a fabulous rate – through the addition of new equipment worth nearly £40,000.
To the university’s computing laboratories in Kensington Terrace ,Newcastle is coming giant magnetic tape equipment and a fast output “punch” for the electronic computer.
The magnetic tape will allow much bigger amounts of information to be stored for both scientific and commercial purposes, and will speed up the “brain’s” operation on many problems.
The new “punch” – which translates the computer’s findings into holes on reels of paper  – will operate more than eight times as fast as the existing mechanism.
Dr. E.S. Page, director of the computing laboratory told me that using the new tape 10,000 figures per second could be handled instead of 200 as at present.
And the new punch would work at the rate of 200 to 300 numbers per second against the present rate of 33.
This is an impressive development of speed for the “brain”, and is made possible by a grant from the University Grants Committee.
Dr. Page said that the North could expect to get more electronic computers – and one aspect that would have to be tackled would be the provision of enough highly skilled personnel to handle them.
He revealed that Ferdinand, which had been employed in an experiment with a local engineering firm to discover if it could solve industrial problems, had come through phase one successfully.
It had shown the loading of each machine in the factory, which in turn showed the amount of work waiting to be done.

• FERDINAND sometimes works right around the clock, but its usual shift is from 8:30 a.m. until 9:00 p.m.

[Source: Evening Chronicle, 2nd February, 1960.]