CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the world’s largest particle physics centre. Here physicists come to explore what matter is made of and what forces hold it together. CERN exists primarily to provide them with the necessary tools. These are accelerators, which accelerate particles to almost the speed…
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 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…
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…
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…
Regency Electronics produced the first commercial transistor radio, the Regency TR-1, it hit the consumer market in October, 1954. It featured four germanium transistors operating on a 22.5-volt battery that provided over twenty hours of life (tube radios with batteries only lasted several hours at best-ref). Several colors were initially…
Newly-christened Texas Instruments, the company becomes the first to produce silicon transistors for the mass market and designs the world’s first transistor radio. Later this decade, Jack Kilby invents the integrated circuit, enabling the digital revolution and forever changing the world.
There was no doubt about it, point-contact transistors were fidgety. The transistors being made by Bell just didn’t work the same way twice, and on top of that, they were noisy. While one lab at Bell was trying to improve those first type-A transistors, William Shockley was working on a…