I was looking at the obituary of John Backus, IBM employee who was the principal inventor of FORTRAN. He died in 2007, and his obituary mentioned the "Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC)". I google'd that and came across this scanned interesting book about the IBM Watson Laboratory. It provides a general description of this machine, which was programmed to display "see Thomas" upon a certain condition occurring.
A very interesting look at computing's early years.
Edited: 5 Mar 2011, 4:49 a.m.