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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.
The first fully mechanical digital computer, the Z1, operated at 1 Hz (cycle per second) clock frequency and the first electromechanical general purpose computer, the Z3, operated at a frequency of about 5–10 Hz. The first electronic general purpose computer, the ENIAC, used a 100 kHz clock in its cycling unit. As each instruction took 20 ...
ENIAC (/ ˈ ɛ n i æ k /; Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) [1] [2] was the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer, completed in 1945. [ 3 ] [ 4 ] Other computers had some of these features, but ENIAC was the first to have them all.
The machine was fairly representative of first-generation valve-driven computer designs. It used mercury acoustic delay lines as its primary data storage, with a typical capacity of 768 20- bit words, supplemented by a parallel disk-type device with a total 4096-word capacity and an access time of 10 milliseconds.
Subsequently, the first computer programmers used binary code to instruct computers to perform various tasks. Nevertheless, the process was very arduous. Nevertheless, the process was very arduous. Computer programmers had to provide long strings of binary code to tell the computer what kind of data it should store.
Their first transistorized computer, and the first in the world, was operational by 1953, [146] and a second version was completed there in April 1955. [146] The 1955 version used 200 transistors, 1,300 solid-state diodes, and had a power consumption of 150 watts. However, the machine did make use of valves to generate its 125 kHz clock ...
The first computer to use magnetic tape. EDVAC could have new programs loaded from the tape. Proposed by John von Neumann, it was installed at the Institute for Advance Study, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, US. 1951: Australia CSIRAC used to play music – the first time a computer was used as a musical instrument. 1951: US
In the first generation, word-oriented computers typically had a single accumulator and an extension, referred to as, e.g., Upper and Lower Accumulator, Accumulator and Multiplier-Quotient (MQ) register. In the second generation, it became common for computers to have multiple addressable accumulators.