MISTIC

Powered by vacuum tubes, its design was based on ILLIAC, the supercomputer built at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, a descendant of the IAS architecture developed by John von Neumann.

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.

Both ILLIAC and MISTIC were based on the Institute for Advanced Study's (IAS) computer, known for its revolutionary storage of data and instructions in the same memory.

The university has owned many mainframes since MISTIC, but none has ever had as magical and inspirational effect as the one that was built on the fifth floor of the Electrical Engineering building, now the Computer Center.

Facts from the exhibit MISTIC Memories: 50 Years of Computing at MSU, which ran from September 29, 2006 through March 31, 2007 at the Michigan State University Museum:[1]