The Naval Ordnance Research Calculator (NORC) for several years considered...(More)

The Naval Ordnance Research Calculator (NORC) for several years considered the fastest computer on Earth was built by IBM in the early 1950s and formally delivered to the U.S. Navy on December 2, 1954. Capable of executing 15,000 complete arithmetic calculations a second, NORC was constructed at the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory at Columbia University in New York City and later installed at the Navy's Computation Laboratory at the Naval Proving Ground in Dahlgren, Va.(Less)