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A vacuum-tube computer, now termed a first-generation computer, is a computer that uses vacuum tubes for logic circuitry. While the history of mechanical aids to computation goes back centuries, if not millennia, the history of vacuum tube computers is confined to the middle of the 20th century. Lee De Forest invented the triode in 1906. The ...
7AK7 vacuum tubes in a 1956 UNIVAC I computer. UNIVAC I used 6,103 vacuum tubes, [24] [25] weighed 16,686 pounds (8.3 short tons; 7.6 t), consumed 125 kW, [26] and could perform about 1,905 operations per second running on a 2.25 MHz clock. The Central Complex alone (i.e. the processor and memory unit) was 4.3 m by 2.4 m by 2.6 m high.
Vacuum-tube computers, now called first-generation computers, [1] are programmable digital computers using vacuum-tube logic circuitry. They were preceded by systems using electromechanical relays and followed by systems built from discrete transistors. Some later computers on the list had both vacuum tubes and transistors.
One early UNIVAC line of vacuum tube computers was based on the ERA 1101 and those models built at ERA were rebadged as UNIVAC 110x; despite the 1100 model numbers, they were not related to the latter 1100/2200 series. The 1103A is credited in the literature as the first computer to have interrupts.
It was one of the first computers to be used remotely and probably the first to routinely be used remotely. The ORDVAC used 2178 vacuum tubes. Its addition time was 72 microseconds and the multiplication time was 732 microseconds. Its main memory consisted of 1024 words of 40 bits each, stored using Williams tubes.
The UNIVAC Solid State was a magnetic drum-based solid-state computer announced by Sperry Rand in December 1958 as a response to the IBM 650.It was one of the first [1] [2] [citation needed] computers offered for sale to be (nearly) entirely solid-state, using 700 transistors, and 3000 magnetic amplifiers (FERRACTOR) for primary logic, and 20 vacuum tubes largely for power control.
The 1103A was contemporary with, and a competitor to, the IBM 704, which also employed vacuum-tube logic, magnetic-core memory, and floating-point hardware. A version of this machine was sold to the Lewis Research Center, NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) in Cleveland, Ohio. It had the first magnetic core of 1096 words of 36 bits.
The computer had 2,800 vacuum tubes, measured 10 ft (3 m) by 2 ft (0.6 m) by 8½ ft (2.6 m) (L×B×H), and weighed 4,000 pounds (2.0 short tons; 1.8 t). [3] ILLIAC I was very powerful for its time; in 1956, it had more computing power than all of Bell Telephone Laboratories .