IBM 1130

In 1969, an IBM 1130 computer was installed in the basement of Bidston Observatory, connected to an IBM 360 at the London Data Centre. This was relatively late - prior to this, data scientists still had to send off the charts to an organisation in Cheshire. Oceanographers at the time used this machine to model coastal & shelf seas.

On how the capacities of processing define the measurement:

Astronomers have long measured the passage of time using Julian dates, defined by Joseph Scaliger in 1853 as the number of days that have passed since noon on January 1, 4713 BC. In 1957, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Union wanted to track Sputnik using a 36-bit IBM 704 computer. They needed 18 bits to store the time down to 100 nanoseconds. The day had to fit in the remaining 18 bits, so they tracked a Modified Julian Date, defined as the days since midnight of November 17, 1858 (Julian day 2,400,000.5).