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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.
List of vacuum-tube computers. EDSAC. 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 ...
A vacuum tube, electron tube, [ 1][ 2][ 3] valve (British usage), or tube (North America) [ 4] is a device that controls electric current flow in a high vacuum between electrodes to which an electric potential difference has been applied. The type known as a thermionic tube or thermionic valve utilizes thermionic emission of electrons from a ...
UNIVAC I. The UNIVAC I ( Universal Automatic Computer I) was the first general-purpose electronic digital computer design for business application produced in the United States. It was designed principally by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, the inventors of the ENIAC. Design work was started by their company, Eckert–Mauchly Computer ...
The Atanasoff–Berry computer ( ABC) was the first automatic electronic digital computer. [ 1] Limited by the technology of the day, and execution, the device has remained somewhat obscure. The ABC's priority is debated among historians of computer technology, because it was neither programmable, nor Turing-complete. [ 2]
The history of computing hardware starting at 1960 is marked by the conversion from vacuum tube to solid-state devices such as transistors and then integrated circuit (IC) chips. Around 1953 to 1959, discrete transistors started being considered sufficiently reliable and economical that they made further vacuum tube computers uncompetitive.
Colossus was a set of computers developed by British codebreakers in the years 1943–1945 [ 1] to help in the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher. Colossus used thermionic valves (vacuum tubes) to perform Boolean and counting operations. Colossus is thus regarded [ 2] as the world's first programmable, electronic, digital computer, although it ...
Whirlwind I was a Cold War-era vacuum-tube computer developed by the MIT Servomechanisms Laboratory for the U.S. Navy.Operational in 1951, it was among the first digital electronic computers that operated in real-time for output, and the first that was not simply an electronic replacement of older mechanical systems.