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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This first-generation computer had 6200 vacuum tubes and 60,000 semiconductor diodes.. Strela's speed was 2000 operations per second. Its floating-point arithmetic was based on 43-bit floating point words, with a signed 35-bit mantissa and a signed 6-bit exponent.
DYSEAC was a first-generation computer built by the National Bureau of Standards for the U.S. Army Signal Corps. It was housed in a truck, making it one of the first movable computers (perhaps the first). It went into operation in April 1954. [1] DYSEAC used 900 vacuum tubes and 24,500 crystal diodes.
This machine was, it should be emphasized, probably the first use of vacuum tubes to do digital computation and was a special-purpose machine. This machine never saw the light of day as a serious tool for computation since it was somewhat premature in its engineering conception and limited in its logical one.