ORDVAC

J. P. Nash of the University of Illinois was a developer of both the ORDVAC and of the university's own identical copy, the ILLIAC, which was later renamed the ILLIAC I. Abe Taub, Sylvian Ray, and Donald B. Gillies[5] assisted in the checkout of ORDVAC at Aberdeen Proving Ground.

ORDVAC and its successor at Aberdeen Proving Ground, BRLESC, used their own unique notation for hexadecimal numbers.

Instead of the sequence A B C D E F universally used today, the digits ten to fifteen were represented by the letters K S N J F L (King Sized Numbers Just For Laughs), corresponding to the teleprinter characters on five-track paper tape.

When ORDVAC was completed, it was tested at the University of Illinois and then disassembled and shipped to Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.

Three faculty members including Sylvian Ray and Abe Taub drove to Maryland to help assemble the machine, which was reconstructed and passed its validation tests in just a week.