MISTIC

The MISTIC, or Michigan State Integral Computer, was the first computer system at Michigan State University and was built by its students, faculty and staff in 1956. Powered by vacuum tubes, its design was based on ILLIAC, the supercomputer built at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a descendent of the IAS architecture developed by John von Neumann.

The interest in developing a computer system at Michigan State University (MSU) began several years before MISTIC was conceived. In 1954 when MSU was known as Michigan State College (MSC), Professor J. Sutherland Frame of the Mathematics department sent a proposal for a computer donation from the United States Army Aberdeen Proving Ground. Unfortunately, a federal agency won that donation and the computing vision was not realized at that time.

However, all hope was not lost. In April 1955, Dr. Frame, Dr. Kenneth Arnold, Dr. John Hofman, Francis Martin, Dr. George Swenson Jr., Dr. Lloyd Turk, and Dr. Charles Wells traveled to the University of Illinois to examine the ILLIAC, one of the few university-operated digital computers of its time. When they returned to MSU they made a recommendation to the university to build its own computing facility. The Board of Trustees and MSU president John A. Hannah quickly approved it. John Ryder, MSC's Dean of Engineering, former head of Electrical Engineering at University of Illinois had assisted in the construction of the ILLIAC, estimated that MSC could build their ILLIAC equivalent (including hiring two engineers) for $150,000.

Interests in designing MISTIC as the ILLIAC computer model at MSU was gaining attention from wide areas of academia within the United States, even as far as Iowa State University where Electrical Engineering Professor Dr. Lawrence Wayne Von Tersch originated. He came to MSU in March 1956 with the interest in the ILLIAC platform due to its large amount of statistical software available on paper tape. After a summer of study of the ILLIAC in Illinois, Dr. Von Tersch and three of his graduate students began building MISTIC in the fall of 1956.

...
Wikipedia