Floyd Steele

Floyd George Steele (June 28, 1918 – September 23, 1995) was an American physicist, engineer, and computer inventor. He is known for leading the design team which developed the MADIDDA, an early digital computer.

Floyd Steele grew up in Brush, Colorado. He was named after his uncle, Floyd Odlum, a businessman known for coming out on top of the depression, and who was a major share holder of Hollywood film company RKO, as well as various aeronautical engineering companies.

Steele was the conceptual leader of the MADDIDA design group at Northrop Corporation.

Development of the MADDIDA began in 1946 with the goal of producing the first DIgital Data Analyzer (DIDA). When the decision was made to use MAgnetic Drum memory (MAD) for the DIDA, the name was lengthened to MADDIDA (pronounced "Mad Ida").

Steele drew influence from the analog computer invented in 1927 by Vannevar Bush, which had digital components. Another influence to the MADDIDA's design was Lord Kelvin's Tide Predicting Machine, an analog computer completed in 1873. Steele hired Donald Eckdahl, Hrant (Harold) Sarkinssian, and Richard Sprague to work on the MADIDDA's germanium diode logic circuits and also to do magnetic recording.

In contrast to the ENIAC and UNIVAC I, which used electrical pulses to represent bits, the MADDIDA was the first computer to represent bits using voltage levels. It was also the first computer whose entire logic was specified in Boolean algebra. These features were an advancement from earlier digital computers which still had analog circuitry components.

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