Aarni Perko
By modern standards the capabilities of Wegematic 1000 were very modest. Its working storage was only 128 32-bit words. A drum with 256 32 word blocks was used as the mass storage. Computing was done by fixed point. Programs were written in hexadecimal code. Time for fixed point addition was about 0.1 sec. At the initial stage, program libraries were rather small.
My first project was to program some ship calculations for the Chrichton-Vulcan shipyard (Wärtsila Co, nowadays Masa Yards) advised by Valter Kostilainen.
The first part of the program contained hydrostatic calculations (volumes in different depths, areas of waterlines, metacentric heights etc.). The geometry of the ship was given simply as coordinates of cross sections. Integrations were done with Simpson's rule. A great help for programming was that Wegematic had an index register and subroutine capability.