SEAC

The Standards Eastern Automatic Computer went into service at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington in May 1950, becoming the first operational stored-program computer in the United States — not because it was the most ambitious, but because it was the least. The NBS had ordered both EDVAC and UNIVAC, grew tired of waiting, and threw together SEAC as a stopgap. It beat both of them into operation.

SEAC held its data in mercury delay lines and was among the first machines to use germanium diodes rather than vacuum tubes for its logic — thousands of them, which made it unusually small and reliable for the era. In 1957 it scanned the world's first digital image, a 176×176 picture of Russell Kirsch's infant son. The machine served until 1964.