MISTIC
Encyclopedia
Michigan State University
Michigan State University is a public research university in East Lansing, Michigan, USA. Founded in 1855, it was the pioneer land-grant institution and served as a model for future land-grant colleges in the United States under the 1862 Morrill Act.MSU pioneered the studies of packaging,...
and was built by its students, faculty and staff in 1956. Powered by vacuum tubes, its design was based on ILLIAC
ILLIAC
ILLIAC was a series of supercomputers built at a variety of locations, some at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In all, five computers were built in this series between 1951 and 1974...
, the supercomputer built at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a large public research-intensive university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system...
, a descendent of the IAS
IAS machine
The IAS machine was the first electronic computer built by the Institute for Advanced Study , in Princeton, New Jersey, USA. It is sometimes called the von Neuman machine, since the paper describing its design was edited by John von Neumann, a mathematics professor at both Princeton University...
architecture developed by John von Neumann
John von Neumann
John von Neumann was a Hungarian-American mathematician and polymath who made major contributions to a vast number of fields, including set theory, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, ergodic theory, geometry, fluid dynamics, economics and game theory, computer science, numerical analysis,...
.
History
The interest in developing a computer system at Michigan State UniversityMichigan State University
Michigan State University is a public research university in East Lansing, Michigan, USA. Founded in 1855, it was the pioneer land-grant institution and served as a model for future land-grant colleges in the United States under the 1862 Morrill Act.MSU pioneered the studies of packaging,...
(MSU) began several years before MISTIC was conceived. In 1954 when MSU was known as Michigan State College (MSC), Professor J. Sutherland Frame of the Mathematics department sent a proposal for a computer donation from the United States Army Aberdeen Proving Ground
Aberdeen Proving Ground
Aberdeen Proving Ground is a United States Army facility located near Aberdeen, Maryland, . Part of the facility is a census-designated place , which had a population of 3,116 at the 2000 census.- History :...
. Unfortunately, a federal agency won that donation and the computing vision was not realized at that time.
However, all hope was not lost. In April 1955, Dr. Frame, Dr. Kenneth Arnold, Dr. John Hofman, Francis Martin, Dr. George Swenson Jr., Dr. Lloyd Turk, and Dr. Charles Wells traveled to the University of Illinois to examine the ILLIAC, one of the few university-operated digital computers of its time. When they returned to MSU they made a recommendation to the university to build its own computing facility. The Board of Trustees and MSU president John A. Hannah
John A. Hannah
John Alfred Hannah was president of Michigan State College for 28 years, making him the longest serving of MSU's presidents. He is credited with transforming the school from a little-known, regional agricultural college into a large national research institution...
quickly approved it. John Ryder, MSC's Dean of Engineering, former head of Electrical Engineering at University of Illinois had assisted in the construction of the ILLIAC, estimated that MSC could build their ILLIAC equivalent (including hiring two engineers) for $150,000.
The MISTIC
Interests in designing MISTIC as the ILLIACILLIAC
ILLIAC was a series of supercomputers built at a variety of locations, some at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In all, five computers were built in this series between 1951 and 1974...
computer model at MSU was gaining attention from wide areas of academia within the United States, even as far as Iowa State University
Iowa State University
Iowa State University of Science and Technology, more commonly known as Iowa State University , is a public land-grant and space-grant research university located in Ames, Iowa, United States. Iowa State has produced astronauts, scientists, and Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners, along with a host of...
where Electrical Engineering
Electrical engineering
Electrical engineering is a field of engineering that generally deals with the study and application of electricity, electronics and electromagnetism. The field first became an identifiable occupation in the late nineteenth century after commercialization of the electric telegraph and electrical...
Professor Dr. Lawrence Wayne Von Tersch originated. He came to MSU in March 1956 with the interest in the ILLIAC platform due to its large amount of statistical software available on paper tape. After a summer of study of the ILLIAC in Illinois, Dr. Von Tersch and three of his graduate students began building MISTIC in the fall of 1956.
Both ILLIAC and MISTIC were based on the Institute for Advanced Study
Institute for Advanced Study
The Institute for Advanced Study, located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States, is an independent postgraduate center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It was founded in 1930 by Abraham Flexner...
's (IAS
IAS machine
The IAS machine was the first electronic computer built by the Institute for Advanced Study , in Princeton, New Jersey, USA. It is sometimes called the von Neuman machine, since the paper describing its design was edited by John von Neumann, a mathematics professor at both Princeton University...
) computer, known for its revolutionary storage of data and instructions in the same memory. MISTIC and IAS consisted of five sections - input, memory, arithmetic processing, control, and output - setting the standard for at least twelve other computers later built.
MISTIC was built on the fifth floor, Room 500, of the Electrical Engineering Building, which today is the MSU Computer Center. Completed in the fall of 1957, the MISTIC weighed about one ton, filled the whole room, and was capable of storing 1,024 40-bit words (5 KB
Kilobyte
The kilobyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Although the prefix kilo- means 1000, the term kilobyte and symbol KB have historically been used to refer to either 1024 bytes or 1000 bytes, dependent upon context, in the fields of computer science and information...
) in memory. Its anticipation sparked the establishment of the MSU Computer Laboratory in 1956 under the direction of Dr. Von Tersch. It was used in MSU's first computer course taught by computer coding professor Dr. Gerard Weeg. Departments from all over the MSU campus utilized the MISTIC for a myriad of courses and activities.
2006 marked the 50th anniversary of Michigan State University's first computer system, the MISTIC.
The Post-MISTIC
MISTIC was the introduction of digital computing to the university, first step in the vast unexplored field. Computers with higher computational power followed within a few years. The vacuum tube based MISTIC was replaced by transistor based Control Data CorporationControl Data Corporation
Control Data Corporation was a supercomputer firm. For most of the 1960s, it built the fastest computers in the world by far, only losing that crown in the 1970s after Seymour Cray left the company to found Cray Research, Inc....
(CDC) 3600 in 1963, CDC 6500 in 1968, CDC 170-750 in 1979 and many more down the years. MISTIC proved to be the cornerstone that changed the way faculty and students perceived computation. The university has owned many mainframes since MISTIC, but none has ever had as magical and inspirational effect as the one that was built on the fifth floor of the Electrical Engineering building, now the Computer Center.
Facts from the Michigan State University Museum Exhibit
- MISTIC contained 2,610 vacuum tubes for processing and memory.
- Arithmetic Unit and Storage was in a cabinet that was 10 feet (3 m) high and 11 feet (3.4 m) long.
- Magnetic core memory was added in 1960, increasing the memory to 20K, roughly four times what the MISTIC began with.
- Computations were output on a teletype printer at the rate of 10 characters per second.
- Card Reader could read punch cards at a rate of 200 cards per minute.