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The first example of using vacuum tubes for computation, the Atanasoff–Berry computer, was demonstrated in 1939. Vacuum-tube computers were initially one-of-a-kind designs, but commercial models were introduced in the 1950s and sold in volumes ranging from single digits to thousands of units.
The Atanasoff–Berry computer (ABC) was the first automatic electronic digital computer ... the first to implement: Using vacuum tubes, rather than wheels, ratchets ...
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.
Valves (vacuum tubes) seen on end in a recreation of the Colossus computer. Colossus was developed for the "Newmanry", [31] the section headed by the mathematician Max Newman that was responsible for machine methods against the twelve-rotor Lorenz SZ40/42 on-line teleprinter cipher machine (code-named Tunny, for tunafish).
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.
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.
The Gamma 3 was an early electronic vacuum-tube computer.It was designed by Compagnie des Machines Bull in Paris, France and released in 1952.. Originally designed as an electronic accelerator for electromechanical tabulating machines, similar to the IBM 604, it was gradually enhanced with new features and evolved into a first-generation stored program computer (Gamma AET, 1955, then ET, 1957).
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. Operative Williams tube memory (RAM) had 2048 words.