Vacuum tube age

1944 Designed by British engineer Tommy Flowers, the Colossus is designed to break the complex Lorenz
ciphers used by the Nazis during World War II. Colossus reduced the time to break Lorenz messages from
weeks to hours.

Started in 1943, the ENIAC computing system was built by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert at the
Moore School of Electrical Engineering of the University of Pennsylvania, being over 1,000 times faster
than any previous computer.

The Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC) project, led by IBM engineer Wallace Eckert, uses
both relays and vacuum tubes to process scientific data at the rate of 50 14 x 14 digit multiplications per
second. Before its decommissioning in 1952, the SSEC produced the moon position tables used in early
planning of the 1969 Apollo XII moon landing.The SSEC was one of the last of the generation of 'super
calculators' to be built using electromechanical technology.

The first practical stored-program computer to provide a regular computing service, EDSAC is built at
Cambridge University using vacuum tubes and mercury delay lines for memory.

MADDIDA is a digital drum-based differential analyzer originally created for a nuclear missile design
project in 1949 by a team led by Fred Steele. It used 53 vacuum tubes and hundreds of germanium
diodes, with a magnetic drum for memory.

Built by a team led by engineers Frederick Williams and Tom Kilburn, the Mark I serves as the prototype
for Ferranti’s first computer – the Ferranti Mark 1. The Manchester Mark I used more than 1,300 vacuum
tubes and occupied an area the size of a medium room.

The Standards Eastern Automatic Computer (SEAC) is among the first stored program computers
completed in the United States. . It was one of the first computers to use all-diode logic, a technology
more reliable than vacuum tubes. The world's first scanned image was made on SEAC by engineer
Russell Kirsch in 1957.

The Univac 1 is the first commercial computer to attract widespread public attention. Created by Presper
Eckert and John Mauchly -- designers of the earlier ENIAC computer -- the Univac 1 used 5,200 vacuum
tubes and weighed 29,000 pounds. Remington Rand eventually sold 46 Univac 1s at more than $1 million
each.

Transistor Age

1953
Richard Grimsdale and Douglas Webb demonstrate a prototype transistorized computer, the
"Manchester TC", on November 16, 1953. The 48-bit machine used 92 point-contact transistors and 550
diodes.

The TX-0 (“Transistor eXperimental - 0”) is the first general-purpose programmable computer built with
transistors.

The 501 is built on a 'building block' concept which allows it to be highly flexible for many different uses
and could simultaneously control up to 63 tape drives—very useful for large databases of information

The first large-scale computer communications network, SAGE connects 23 hardened computer sites in
the US and Canada. Its task was to detect incoming Soviet bombers and direct interceptor aircraft to
destroy them. Operators directed actions by touching a light gun to the SAGE airspace display. The air
defense system used two AN/FSQ-7 computers, each of which used a full megawatt of power to drive its
55,000 vacuum tubes, 175,000 diodes and 13,000 transistors.

An early transistorized computer, the NEAC (Nippon Electric Automatic Computer) includes a CPU,
console, paper tape reader and punch, printer and magnetic tape units.

IBM´s 7000 series of mainframe computers are the company´s first to use transistors.

The 1401 mainframe, the first in the series, replaces earlier vacuum tube technology with smaller, more
reliable transistors. Demand called for more than 12,000 of the 1401 computers, and the machine´s
success made a strong case for using general-purpose computers rather than specialized systems. By the
mid-1960s, nearly half of all computers in the world were IBM 1401s.

Minuteman missiles use transistorized computers to continuously calculate their position in flight.

A joint project of England’s Manchester University, Ferranti Computers, and Plessey, Atlas comes online
nine years after Manchester’s computer lab begins exploring transistor technology.

Integrated circuits age

1966 System/360 is a major event in the history of computing. On April 7, IBM announced five models of
System/360, spanning a 50-to-1 performance range. At the same press conference, IBM also announced
40 completely new peripherals for the new family. System/360 was aimed at both business and scientific
customers and all models could run the same software, largely without modification. IBM’s initial
investment of $5 billion was quickly returned as orders for the system climbed to 1,000 per month within
two years. At the time IBM released the System/360, the company had just made the transition from
discrete transistors to integrated circuits, and its major source of revenue began to move from punched
card equipment to electronic computer systems.

The 2116A is HP’s first computer. It was developed as a versatile instrument controller for HP's growing
family of programmable test and measurement products. It interfaced with a wide number of standard
laboratory instruments, allowing customers to computerize their instrument systems. The 2116A also
marked HP's first use of integrated circuits in a commercial product.

The first large commercial computers to use integrated circuits, RCA highlights the IC's advantage over
IBM’s custom SLT modules. Spectra systems were marketed on the basis of their compatibility with the
IBM System/360 series of computer since it implemented the IBM 360 instruction set and could run
most IBM software with little or no modification.

Designed by scientists and engineers at MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory, the Apollo Guidance
Computer (AGC) is the culmination of years of work to reduce the size of the Apollo spacecraft computer
from the size of seven refrigerators side-by-side to a compact unit weighing only 70 lbs. The AGC was
one of the earliest uses of integrated circuits, and used core memory, as well as read-only magnetic rope
memory. The astronauts were responsible for entering more than 10,000 commands into the AGC for
each trip between Earth and the Moon.

One of the earliest personal computers, the Kenbak-1 is advertised for $750 in Scientific American
magazine. Designed by John V. Blankenbaker using standard medium-- and small-scale integrated
circuits, the Kenbak-1 relied on switches for input and lights for output from its 256-byte memory. In
1973, after selling only 40 machines, Kenbak Corporation closed its doors.

The fastest machine of its day, The Cray-1's speed comes partly from its shape, a "C," which reduces the
length of wires and thus the time signals need to travel across them. High packaging density of
integrated circuits and a novel Freon cooling system also contributed to its speed. Each Cray-1 took a full
year to assemble and test and cost about $10 million. Typical applications included US national defense
work, including the design and simulation of nuclear weapons, and weather forecasting.