CALDIC was designed to be constructed at a low cost and simple to operate, by standards of the time, note that in a pre-1965 context there is no interactive user IO or human readable output in printed characters in most computers.
It was a serial decimal machine with an 8-inch-diameter (200 mm), 10,000-word magnetic drum memory.
(As CALDIC's decimal words were 10 digits each, the magnetic memory could store about 400,000 bits.)
It contained 1,300 vacuum tubes, 1,000 crystal diodes, 100 magnetic elements (for the recording heads), and 12 relays (in the power supply).
Morton oversaw the design and construction with a team comprising electrical engineering graduate and undergraduate students at the university, more than 35 in total, including Doug Engelbart (who later invented the computer mouse) and Al Hoagland (a pioneer of the computer disk industry).