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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.
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 was programmed by switches and plugs and not by a stored program. [3]
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.
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.
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.
Later thermionic vacuum tubes, mostly miniature style, some with top cap connections for higher voltages. 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 vacuum-tube SAGE air-defense computers became remarkably reliable – installed in pairs, one off-line, tubes likely to fail did so when the computer was intentionally run at reduced power to find them. Hot-pluggable hard disks, like the hot-pluggable vacuum tubes of yesteryear, continue the tradition of repair during continuous operation ...