The machine was the size and shape of a bathtub, about four feet high, with a hinged lid for access.
However, shortly after completing the design Cray left to join Control Data Corporation. So when the Navy awarded Sperry Rand a $50 million contract to build the AN/USQ-17, the loss of the engineers that understood the machine forced Sperry to redesign the entire machine from scratch (retaining the instruction set so that programs developed for the original machine would still run on the new one). As part of the redesign it was decided to improve access, and the second version was designed to stand upright, like an old fashioned double-door refrigerator, about six feet tall. This new design was designated the AN/USQ-20.
Instructions were represented as 30-bit words, in the following format:
f 6 bits function code j 3 bits jump condition designator k 3 bits partial word designator b 3 bits which index register to use y 15 bits operand address in memoryNumbers were represented as 30-bit words, this allowed for five 6-bit alphanumeric characters per word.
The main memory was 32,768 = 32K words of core memory.
The available registers were: