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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.
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.
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.
Third generation (integrated circuit) computers first appeared in the early 1960s in computers developed for government purposes, and then in commercial computers beginning in the mid-1960s. The first silicon IC computer was the Apollo Guidance Computer or AGC. [169]
The first one was installed in late 1954 and it was the most popular computer of the 1950s. [ 8 ] The 650 was offered to business, scientific and engineering users as a slower and less expensive alternative to the IBM 701 and IBM 702 computers, which were for scientific and business purposes respectively. [ 7 ]
Computers built between 1964 and 1972 are often regarded as third-generation computers; they are based on the first integrated circuits – creating even smaller machines. Typical of such machines were the HP 2116A and Data General Nova .
The first digital electronic computer was developed in the period April 1936 - June 1939, in the IBM Patent Department, Endicott, New York by Arthur Halsey Dickinson. [35] [36] [37] In this computer IBM introduced, a calculating device with a keyboard, processor and electronic output (display). The competitor to IBM was the digital electronic ...
It was designed and invented by John Blankenbaker of Kenbak Corporation in 1970, and was first sold in early 1971. Unlike a modern personal computer, the Kenbak-1 was built of small-scale integrated circuits, and did not use a microprocessor. The system first sold for US$750. Only 44 machines were ever sold, though it's said 50 to 52 were built.