The Computing Program of the Office of Naval Research, 1946-1953

The computing program of the Office of Naval Research was concerned primarily with numerical analysis and with computers developed at universities; but ONR also participated in the National Bureau of Standards program, under which the UNIVAC was successfully produced commercially for the Census Bureau and the SEAC and SWAC were constructed at NBS. By 1953, ONR´s principal computer projects, at the Institute for Advanced Study and at MIT, had produced important results; numerical analysis had emerged as a respectable field of mathematical research; and large commercial companies, which had held back in the immediate postwar years, had committed themselves to the manufacture of computers.