The principal designer of this machine was John Lentz, as part of his work for the Watson Lab at Columbia University.

[3] It was designed to be used in a normal office, without any special electrical or air conditioning requirements.

It used vacuum tubes, a magnetic drum, and punched paper tape readers and punchers.

The input was from a keyboard and output was to an IBM electric typewriter, at eighteen characters per second.

The term "auto-point" referred to the ability to automatically adjust the decimal point in floating-point arithmetic.