In fairness, several of the other universities, including Princeton, invented new technology (new types of memory or I/O devices) during the construction of their computers, which delayed those projects.
For ILLIAC I, II, and IV, students associated with IAS at Princeton (Abraham H. Taub, Donald B. Gillies, Daniel Slotnick) played a key role in the computer designs.
Immediately after the 1957 launch of Sputnik, the ILLIAC I was used to calculate an ephemeris of the satellite's orbit, later published in Nature.
A "fast buffer" was also provided for storage of short loops and intermediate results (similar in concept to what is now called cache).
Hideo Aiso (相磯秀夫, 1932-) from Japan participated in the development program and designed the arithmetic logic unit from September 1960.
[5] The ILLIAC III was a fine-grained SIMD pattern recognition computer built by the University of Illinois in 1966.
This ILLIAC's initial task was image processing of bubble chamber experiments used to detect nuclear particles.
Key to the design as conceived by Daniel Slotnick, the director of the project, was fairly high parallelism with up to 256 processors, used to allow the machine to work on large data sets in what would later be known as array processing.
Originally Texas Instruments made a commitment to build the Processing Elements (PEs) out of large scale integrated (LSI) circuits.
This required a complete redesign using medium scale integrated circuits, leading to large delays and greatly increasing costs.
The power supply buss bars on the machine spanned distances greater than three feet, and were octopus-like in design.
Thick copper, the busses were coated in epoxy that often cracked resulting in shorts and an array of other issues.
ILLIAC IV was designed by Burroughs Corporation and built in quadrants in Great Valley, PA during the years of 1967 through 1972.
When this claim proved to be false, the focus shifted to the role of universities in secret military research.
ARPA wanted the machine room encased in copper to prevent off site snooping of classified data.
One was that Slotnick was concerned that the physical presence of the machine on campus might attract violence on the part of student radicals.
The Control Unit, a few PEs, and its 10 megabyte drives may be seen today at the Computer History Museum in California.