There were two major purposes in designing the Rice machine. The first was to provide a platform on which members of the Rice community could do research that would have been impossibly time-consuming without access to a computer. This was, in fact, the major reason that the project was started: Zevi Salsburg wanted a machine as powerful as Los Alamos's MANIAC II to simulate fluid flow. He did not, however, have any desire to move to Los Alamos, and therefore needed a computer to be built at Rice. The other goal of the machine was to do research into how computers should be built. In the years following John von Neumann's death, the Atomic Energy Commission became quite interested in funding computer research: Salsburg's request came at a time when the AEC's goals could be better met by funding the development of a new system than by offering to build a copy of MANIAC II or to buy a stock IBM computer.
I got an email at the end of last week from my friend Bart Sinclair over in Engineering. He had found an thick file full of various items having to do with the R1 and R2 computers.