Friday, June 26, 2009

computers: 1950-1960

1950
ERA 1101 drum memory

  • Engineering Research Associates of Minneapolis built the ERA 1101, the first commercially produced computer; the company´s first customer was the U.S. Navy. It held 1 million bits on its magnetic drum, the earliest magnetic storage devices. Drums registered information as magnetic pulses in tracks around a metal cylinder. Read/write heads both recorded and recovered the data. Drums eventually stored as many as 4,000 words and retrieved any one of them in as little as five-thousandths of a second.
SEAC

  • The National Bureau of Standards constructed the SEAC (Standards Eastern Automatic Computer) in Washington as a laboratory for testing components and systems for setting computer standards. The SEAC was the first computer to use all-diode logic, a technology more reliable than vacuum tubes, and the first stored-program computer completed in the United States. Magnetic tape in the external storage units (shown on the right of this photo) stored programming information, coded subroutines, numerical data, and output.
SWAC

  • 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.
Pilot ACE

  • Alan Turing´s philosophy directed design of Britain´s Pilot ACE at the National Physical Laboratory."We are trying to build a machine to do all kinds of different things simply by programming rather than by the addition of extra apparatus," Turing said at a symposium on large-scale digital calculating machinery in 1947 in Cambridge, Mass.
Start of project:1948
Completed:1950
Add time:1.8 microseconds
Input/output:cards
Memory size:352 32-digit words
Memory type:delay lines
Technology:800 vacuum tubes
Floor space:12 square feet
Project leader:J. H. Wilkinson
1951
MIT Whirlwind

  • MIT´s Whirlwind debuted on Edward R. Murrow´s "See It Now" television series. Project director Jay Forrester described the computer as a "reliable operating system," running 35 hours a week at 90-percent utility using an electrostatic tube memory.
Start of project:1945
Completed:1951
Add time:.05 microseconds
Input/output:cathode ray tube, paper tape, magnetic tape
Memory size:2048 16-digit words
Memory type:cathode ray tube, magnetic drum, tape (1953 - core memory)
Technology:4,500 vacuum tubes, 14,800 diodes
Floor space:3,100 square feet
Project leaders:Jay Forrester and Robert Everett
LEO

  • 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.
UNIVAC I

  • The UNIVAC I delivered to the U.S. Census Bureau was the first commercial computer to attract widespread public attention. Although manufactured by Remington Rand, the machine often was mistakenly referred to as the "IBM UNIVAC." Remington Rand eventually sold 46 machines at more than $1 million each.F.O.B. factory $750,000 plus $185,000 for a high speed printer.
Speed:1,905 operations per second
Input/output:magnetic tape, unityper, printer
Memory size:1,000 12-digit words in delay lines
Memory type:delay lines, magnetic tape
Technology:serial vacuum tubes, delay lines, magnetic tape
Floor space:943 cubic feet
Cost:F.O.B. factory $750,000 plus $185,000 for a high speed printer
Project leaders:J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly
1952
von Neumann´s IAS

  • John von Neumann´s IAS computer became operational at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, N.J. Contract obliged the builders to share their designs with other research institutes. This resulted in a number of clones: the MANIAC at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, the ILLIAC at the University of Illinois, the Johnniac at Rand Corp., the SILLIAC in Australia, and others.
1953
IBM 701

  • IBM shipped its first electronic computer, the 701. During three years of production, IBM sold 19 machines to research laboratories, aircraft companies, and the federal government.
1954
IBM 650

  • The IBM 650 magnetic drum calculator established itself as the first mass-produced computer, with the company selling 450 in one year. Spinning at 12,500 rpm, the 650´s magnetic data-storage drum allowed much faster access to stored material than drum memory machines.
1956
MIT TX0

  • MIT researchers built the TX-0, the first general-purpose, programmable computer built with transistors. For easy replacement, designers placed each transistor circuit inside a "bottle," similar to a vacuum tube. Constructed at MIT´s Lincoln Laboratory, the TX-0 moved to the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics, where it hosted some early imaginative tests of programming, including a Western movie shown on TV, 3-D tic-tac-toe, and a maze in which mouse found martinis and became increasingly inebriated.
1958
SAGE operator station

  • SAGE — Semi-Automatic Ground Environment — linked hundreds of radar stations in the United States and Canada in the first large-scale computer communications network. An operator directed actions by touching a light gun to the screen.

The air defense system operated on the AN/FSQ-7 computer (known as Whirlwind II during its development at MIT) as its central computer. Each computer used a full megawatt of power to drive its 55,000 vacuum tubes, 175,000 diodes and 13,000 transistors.
  
  • Japan´s NEC built the country´s first electronic computer, the NEAC 1101.
1959
IBM STRETCH

  • IBM´s 7000 series mainframes were the company´s first transistorized computers. At the top of the line of computers — all of which emerged significantly faster and more dependable than vacuum tube machines — sat the 7030, also known as the "Stretch." Nine of the computers, which featured a 64-bit word and other innovations, were sold to national laboratories and other scientific users. L. R. Johnson first used the term "architecture" in describing the Stretch.
1960
DEC PDP-1

  • The precursor to the minicomputer, DEC´s PDP-1 sold for $120,000. One of 50 built, the average PDP-1 included with a cathode ray tube graphic display, needed no air conditioning and required only one operator. It´s large scope intrigued early hackers at MIT, who wrote the first computerized video game, SpaceWar!, for it. The SpaceWar! creators then used the game as a standard demonstration on all 50 computers.

Monday, June 22, 2009

Computers: 1939-1949

1939
David Packard and Bill Hewlett in their Palo Alto, California Garage

  • Hewlett-Packard is Founded. David Packard and Bill Hewlett found Hewlett-Packard in a Palo Alto, California garage. Their first product was the HP 200A Audio Oscillator, which rapidly becomes a popular piece of test equipment for engineers. Walt Disney Pictures ordered eight of the 200B model to use as sound effects generators for the 1940 movie “Fantasia.”

1940
The Complex Number Calculator (CNC)

  • The Complex Number Calculator (CNC) is completed. In 1939, Bell Telephone Laboratories completed this calculator, designed by researcher George Stibitz.  In 1940, Stibitz demonstrated the CNC at an American Mathematical Society conference held at Dartmouth College.  Stibitz stunned the group by performing calculations remotely on the CNC (located in New York City) using a Teletype connected via special telephone lines. This is considered to be the first demonstration of remote access computing.



1941
The Zuse Z3 Computer

  • Konrad Zuse finishes the Z3 computer. TheZ3 was an early computer built by German engineer Konrad Zuse working in complete isolation from developments elsewhere. Using 2,300 relays, the Z3 used floating point binary arithmetic and had a 22-bit word length. The original Z3 was destroyed in a bombing raid of Berlin in late 1943. However, Zuse later supervised a reconstruction of the Z3 in the 1960s which is currently on display at the Deutsches Museum in Berlin.
The Bombe at Work

  • The first Bombe is completed. Based partly on the design of the Polish “Bomba,” a mechanical means of decrypting Nazi military communications during WWII, the British Bombe design was greatly influenced by the work of computer pioneer Alan Turing and others.  Many bombes were built.  Together they dramatically improved the intelligence gathering and processing capabilities of Allied forces. [Computers]
1942
The Atanasoff-Berry Computer

  • The Atanasoff-Berry Computer is completed. Built at Iowa State College (now University), the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) was designed and built by Professor John Vincent Atanasoff and graduate student Cliff Berry between 1939 and 1942. While the ABC was never fully-functional, it won a patent dispute relating to the invention of the computer when Atanasoff proved that ENIAC co-designer John Mauchly had come to see the ABC shortly after it was completed
1943
Whirlwind installation at MIT

  • Project Whirlwind begins. During World War II, the U.S. Navy approached the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) about building a flight simulator to train bomber crews. The team first built a large analog computer, but found it inaccurate and inflexible. After designers saw a demonstration of the ENIAC computer, they decided on building a digital computer. By the time the Whirlwind was completed in 1951, the Navy had lost interest in the project, though the U.S. Air Force would eventually support the project which would influence the design of the SAGE program.

George Stibitz circa 1940

  • The Relay Interpolator is completed. The U.S. Army asked Bell Labs to design a machine to assist in testing its M-9 Gun Director. Bell Labs mathematician George Stibitz recommended using a relay-based calculator for the project. The result was the Relay Interpolator, later called the Bell Labs Model II. The Relay Interpolator used 440 relays and since it was programmable by paper tape, it was used for other applications following the war.
1944
Harvard Mark-I in use, 1944

  • Harvard Mark-1 is completed. Conceived by Harvard professor Howard Aiken, and designed and built by IBM, the Harvard Mark-1 was a room-sized, relay-based calculator. The machine had a fifty-foot long camshaft that synchronized the machine’s thousands of component parts. The Mark-1 was used to produce mathematical tables but was soon superseded by stored program computers.
The Colossus at Work At Bletchley Park

  • The first Colossus is operational at Bletchley Park. Designed by British engineer Tommy Flowers, the Colossus was designed to break the complex Lorenz ciphers used by the Nazis during WWII. A total of ten Colossi were delivered to Bletchley, each using 1,500 vacuum tubes and a series of pulleys transported continuous rolls of punched paper tape containing possible solutions to a particular code. Colossus reduced the time to break Lorenz messages from weeks to hours. The machine’s existence was not made public until the 1970s
1945
John von Neumann

  • John von Neumann wrote "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC" in which he outlined the architecture of a stored-program computer. Electronic storage of programming information and data eliminated the need for the more clumsy methods of programming, such as punched paper tape — a concept that has characterized mainstream computer development since 1945. Hungarian-born von Neumann demonstrated prodigious expertise in hydrodynamics, ballistics, meteorology, game theory, statistics, and the use of mechanical devices for computation. After the war, he concentrated on the development of Princeton´s Institute for Advanced Studies computer and its copies around the world.
1946
ENIAC

  • In February, the public got its first glimpse of the ENIAC, a machine built by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert that improved by 1,000 times on the speed of its contemporaries.
Start of project:1943
Completed:1946
Programmed:plug board and switches
Speed:5,000 operations per second
Input/output:cards, lights, switches, plugs
Floor space:1,000 square feet
Project leaders:John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert.
AVIDAC

  • An inspiring summer school on computing at the University of Pennsylvania´s Moore School of Electrical Engineering stimulated construction of stored-program computers at universities and research institutions. This free, public set of lectures inspired the EDSAC, BINAC, and, later, IAS machine clones like the AVIDAC. Here, Warren Kelleher completes the wiring of the arithmetic unit components of the AVIDAC at Argonne National Laboratory. Robert Dennis installs the inter-unit wiring as James Woody Jr. adjusts the deflection control circuits of the memory unit.
1948
IBM´s SSEC

IBM´s Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator computed scientific data in public display near the company´s Manhattan headquarters. Before its decommissioning in 1952, the SSEC produced the moon-position tables used for plotting the course of the 1969 Apollo flight to the moon.
Speed:50 multiplications per second
Input/output:cards, punched tape
Memory type:punched tape, vacuum tubes, relays
Technology:20,000 relays, 12,500 vacuum tubes
Floor space:25 feet by 40 feet
Project leader:Wallace Eckert

1949
Wilkes with the EDSAC

  • Maurice Wilkes assembled the EDSAC, the first practical stored-program computer, at Cambridge University. His ideas grew out of the Moore School lectures he had attended three years earlier.
For programming the EDSAC, Wilkes
established a library of short programs called
   subroutines stored on punched paper tapes.
Technology:vacuum tubes
Memory:1K words, 17 bits, mercury delay line
Speed:714 operations per second

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