From 1967—Computer-Aided Photo Interpretation in the U.S. Navy

Here is more on the Ramo-Wooldridge AN/UYK-1 (TRW-130) and Univac AN/USQ-20 computers on which the system was built.

The AN/UYK-1, called “Yuck One” by those who programmed and used it, was famously the first computer small enough to fit through the hatch of a submarine, packaged in a cabinet with rounded corners deliberately designed to permit this. It was a 15 bit transistorised machine with an instruction set so rudimentary that not only did it lack multiply and divide instructions, as did small computers of the era, it didn’t even have a subtract instruction—it was a one’s complement machine and to subtract you coded an instruction that inverted all the bits in a register and then added. It was primarily designed to provide the on-board computing capability necessary for submarines and ships to navigate using the Navy’s Transit satellite system, which operated from 1964 until 1996 when it was retired after the Global Positioning System went into operational service. Here is a post about Transit from 2021-10-15, “Before GPS—The Navy Navigation Satellite System”.

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