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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.
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).
A January 15, 1941, story in the Des Moines Register announced the ABC as "an electrical computing machine" with more than 300 vacuum tubes that would "compute complicated algebraic equations" (but gave no precise technical description of the computer). The system weighed more than seven hundred pounds (320 kg).
The 702 was designed for business data processing. Therefore, the memory of the computer was oriented toward storing characters.The system used electrostatic storage, consisting of 14, 28, 42, 56, or 70 Williams tubes with a capacity of 1000 bits each for the main memory, giving a memory of 2,000 to 10,000 characters of seven bits each (in increments of 2,000 characters), and 14 Williams tubes ...
Computer vacuum tubes (3 P) I. IBM vacuum tube computers (17 P) Pages in category "Vacuum tube computers" The following 69 pages are in this category, out of 69 total.
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.
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.