From an IBM press release, 1956 | IBM History. The 650 RAMAC and 305 RAMAC both utilize the magnetic disk memory device announced as experimental by IBM a year ago. Both machines are the first of a planned line of equipment designed for high-volume, in-line processing of business data. Transactions…
The TX-0 (Transistorized eXperimental computer 0) was built to aid in the testing of it’s big brother, the TX-2, and many of the features used in the TX-2 were first tested on the TX-0. This was one of the reasons why the TX-0 was originally equipped with 64Kword memory (each…
From MIT’s Mission and Origins The Institute admitted its first students in 1865, four years after the approval of its founding charter. The event marked the culmination of an extended effort by William Barton Rogers, a distinguished natural scientist, to establish a new kind of independent educational institution relevant to…
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….
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.