Category Archives: Computers

The SAGE (Semi Automatic Ground Enviroment) computer was one of the largest computers ever built, standing two stories tall. It required over 1 million watts of power, and held 200,000 vacuum tubes. When it became operational in 1955, it was the first digital computer used for a major military operation. It was used as an air defense system by the U.S. Air Force, gathering data from outlying radar stations for immediate evaluation. Capable of tracking nearly 400 planes at one of its 26 computer terminals, it provided computerized electronic defense against Russian bombers carrying nuclear weapons. It would coordinate radars and direct friendly plans to intercept.

Weighing in at 250 tons, it gathered its information via telephone lines from as many as 100 radar stations and then processed and displayed it on one of it’s 50 cathode ray tube screens. The result of a massive 6 year development effort, it required 7000 person years of programming and cost around $61 billion.

In 1954 IBM released the next evolution in their 700 series mainframes with the 704. It featured significant improvements over it’s predecessor the 701, including the use of core memory and an expanded instruction set. It wasn’t compatible with it’s older cousin, having a completely new architecture. The 704 was the first mass-produced computer with floating point arithmetic hardware. It did 40k instructions per second and they sold 123 from 1955 to 1960. FORTRAN and LISP were originally developed for the 704. The new instruction set became the basis for the later 700/7000 series systems.

The NORC was a vacuum powered computer built by IBM for the U.S. Navy and was delivered in Decemeber, 1954. It was one of the most powerful computers of it’s day, using Williams tubes for memory and had a speed of 15,000 operations per second. It sported a total of 9,800 vacuum tubes and 10,000 crystal diodes.It also had 8 magnetic tape units and two printers. At the presentation ceremony it calculated pi to 3089 digits in a new record time of 13 minutes. In 1955 the system was moved to the Naval Proving Ground in Virginia, where it was used until 1968.

TRADIC stands for Transistor Digital Computer, and as the name suggests this was the first machine to use all transistors and diodes and no vacuum tubes. It was built by Bell Labs for the U.S. Air Force, which was interested in the lightweight nature of such a computer for airborne use. The machine consisted of 700 point-contact transistors and 10,000 germanium diodes. During two years of continuous operation only 17 of these devices failed, a vastly lower failure rate than vacuum tube machines of the time.

Excerpt from an IBM press release, 1954 | http://www-1.ibm.com/ibm/history/

Called the IBM Magnetic Drum Data Processing Machine, it combines one of the advanced memory devices and the stored program concept of IBM’s big “701, recently announced with new high speed reading capacity in the conventional punched card equipment to achieve a powerful data processing machine for commercial and engineering requirements.

In addition to its usefulness as an accounting and computing tool, the Magnetic Drum Data Processing Machine will be a vital factor in familiarizing business and industry with the stored program principles fundamental to electronic data processing equipment. Though its capacity is large, it is designed for exceptional ease of problem preparation and operation. A significant feature of this machine is its ability to check the accuracy of its answers.

The developers and builders of the 701 had created a computer that consisted of two tape units (each with two tape drives), a magnetic drum memory unit, a cathode-ray tube storage unit, an L-shaped arithmetic and control unit with an operator’s panel, a card reader, a printer, a card punch and three power units. The 701 could perform more than 16,000 addition or subtraction operations a second, read 12,500 digits a second from tape, print 180 letters or numbers a second, and output 400 digits a second from punched-cards.

The need for a system capable of true flight simulation was one of the outcomes of World War II, and the Navy commissioned MIT to research and develop one that could help them train bomber crews. After seeing the results of the school’s study, Project Whirlwind was created with Navy funding.

After discovering limitations in the speed of analog machines, a digital computer was conceived after a demonstration of the ENIAC in 1945. Six years later the first computer that could operate in real time and run output on video displays came online April 20, 1951. Up until then computers were fed single instructions prepared in advance and ran them in the common bit-serial mode. The Whirlwind was designed to use bit-parallel mode, vastly increasing it’s computational power over other machines of the time. The Whirlwind was sixteen times faster than other machines of the era.

Today nearly all computer processors use this mode, marking the Whirlwind as one of the grandfathers of the modern computer age. It was a system that made a hugely influential impact on the design of future machines, and eventually led to the development of the U.S. Air Force’s SAGE system, the TX-0 and TX-2, and contributed to nearly every computer and minicomputer of the early 60s and beyond.

England’s first commercial computer, the Lyons Electronic Office, solved clerical problems. The president of Lyons Tea Co. had the computer, modeled after the EDSAC, built to solve the problem of daily scheduling production and delivery of cakes to the Lyons tea shops. After the success of the first LEO, Lyons went into business manufacturing computers to meet the growing need for data processing systems.

The National Bureau of Standards completed its SWAC (Standards Western Automatic Computer) at the Institute for Numerical Analysis in Los Angeles. Rather than testing components like its companion, the SEAC, the SWAC had an objective of computing using already-developed technology.

The beginning of image processing and the construction of the early National Bureau of Standards Electronic Automatic Computer (SEAC) computer made possible the experiments that led to image processing. SEAC was the first electronic computer with an internally stored program in the United States government. It was the first of three computers built at NBS. It was designed, built, and operated at NBS by engineers, scientists, and mathematicians.