Brooke, A. Wayne

A. Wayne Brooke was born April 20, 1913 and died January 2, 1996. He graduated from Case Western Institute of Technology in 1935 with a Bachelor's of Science in Physics. He served in the United States Navy from 1942 to 1946 as an electronics officer. Brooke joined IBM soon after the war, and his early career at IBM was wholly involved with the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator ( SSEC ) in the world headquarters of IBM in New York City. Brooke was the chief electronic engineer for the project and oversaw a team of engineers during the short life of the SSEC. He transferred to the Raleigh, N.C. IBM office in 1965 after the SSEC was dismantled and retired from IBM after 40 years of service in 1978. He remained involved in the history of computers throughout his life and was a member of various community organizations in the Raleigh area, including the North Carolina Arboretum, Raleigh Coin Club, Raleigh Stamp Club, and the Men's Garden Club .

The SSEC was invented by Wallace J. Eckert, Thomas Watson, and Ron Seeber and installed in IBM's world headquarters on Madison Avenue in New York City. The first day of operation of the SSEC was January 28, 1948, and it was shut down and dismantled in August, 1952. It contained 23,000 relays and 13,000 vacuum tubes, and at the time it was 1,000 times faster than its closest rival. It multiplied 14 decimal digit numbers in 20 milliseconds, and its first assignment was to calculate the positions of the moon from 1952 to 1971. By 1952, the SSEC was outdated by several new computers and was replaced by the IBM 701. It has been argued, by Brooke in particular, that the SSEC was the first electronic computer because of its unique stored-memory capacity.

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