Transistor Computer
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A transistor computer, now often called a second-generation computer, is a
computer A computer is a machine that can be programmed to Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as C ...
which uses
discrete transistor upright=1.4, gate (G), body (B), source (S) and drain (D) terminals. The gate is separated from the body by an insulating layer (pink). A transistor is a semiconductor device used to Electronic amplifier, amplify or electronic switch, switch e ...
s instead of
vacuum tube A vacuum tube, electron tube, valve (British usage), or tube (North America), is a device that controls electric current flow in a high vacuum between electrodes to which an electric voltage, potential difference has been applied. The type kn ...
s. The first generation of electronic computers used vacuum tubes, which generated large amounts of heat, were bulky and unreliable. A second-generation computer, through the late 1950s and 1960s featured
circuit board A printed circuit board (PCB; also printed wiring board or PWB) is a medium used in Electrical engineering, electrical and electronic engineering to connect electronic components to one another in a controlled manner. It takes the form of a L ...
s filled with individual transistors and
magnetic core memory Magnetic-core memory was the predominant form of random-access computer memory for 20 years between about 1955 and 1975. Such memory is often just called core memory, or, informally, core. Core memory uses toroids (rings) of a hard magnetic ...
. These machines remained the mainstream design into the late 1960s, when
integrated circuits An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit (also referred to as an IC, a chip, or a microchip) is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece (or "chip") of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Large numbers of tiny ...
started appearing and led to the
third-generation computer Third generation may refer to: * Third Generation (album), ''Third Generation'' (album), a 1982 album by Hiroshima * The Third Generation (1920 film), ''The Third Generation'' (1920 film), an American drama film directed by Henry Kolker * The Third ...
.


History

The
University of Manchester , mottoeng = Knowledge, Wisdom, Humanity , established = 2004 – University of Manchester Predecessor institutions: 1956 – UMIST (as university college; university 1994) 1904 – Victoria University of Manchester 1880 – Victoria Univer ...
's experimental
Transistor Computer A transistor computer, now often called a second-generation computer, is a computer which uses discrete transistors instead of vacuum tubes. The first generation of electronic computers used vacuum tubes, which generated large amounts of heat, ...
was first operational in November 1953 and it is widely believed to be the first transistor computer to come into operation anywhere in the world. There were two versions of the Transistor Computer, the prototype, operational in 1953, and the full-size version, commissioned in April 1955. The 1953 machine had 92
point-contact transistor The point-contact transistor was the first type of transistor to be successfully demonstrated. It was developed by research scientists John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at Bell Laboratories in December 1947. They worked in a group led by physicis ...
s and 550
diode A diode is a two-terminal electronic component that conducts current primarily in one direction (asymmetric conductance); it has low (ideally zero) resistance in one direction, and high (ideally infinite) resistance in the other. A diode ...
s, manufactured by STC. It had a
48-bit In computer architecture, 48-bit integers can represent 281,474,976,710,656 (248 or 2.814749767×1014) discrete values. This allows an unsigned binary integer range of 0 through 281,474,976,710,655 (248 − 1) or a signed two's complement ra ...
machine word. The 1955 machine had a total of 200 point-contact transistors and 1300 point diodes, which resulted in a power consumption of 150 watts. There were considerable reliability problems with the early batches of transistors and the average error-free run in 1955 was only 1.5 hours. The Transistor Computer also used a small number of tubes in its clock generator, so it was not the first ''fully'' transistorized machine. The design of a full-size Transistor Computer was subsequently adopted by the
Manchester Manchester () is a city in Greater Manchester, England. It had a population of 552,000 in 2021. It is bordered by the Cheshire Plain to the south, the Pennines to the north and east, and the neighbouring city of Salford to the west. The t ...
firm of
Metropolitan-Vickers Metropolitan-Vickers, Metrovick, or Metrovicks, was a British heavy electrical engineering company of the early-to-mid 20th century formerly known as British Westinghouse. Highly diversified, it was particularly well known for its industrial el ...
, who changed all the circuits to use more reliable junction transistors. The production version was known as the
Metrovick 950 The Metrovick 950 was a transistorized computer, built from 1956 onwards by British company Metropolitan-Vickers, to the extent of sixDavid P. Anderson, ''Tom Kilburn: A Pioneer of Computer Design'', IEEE Annals of the History of Computing - Vo ...
and was built from 1956 to the extent of six or seven machines, which were "used commercially within the company" or "mainly for internal use".


Other early machines

During the mid-1950s a series of similar machines appeared. These included the
Bell Laboratories Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...
TRADIC The TRADIC (for TRAnsistor DIgital Computer or TRansistorized Airborne DIgital Computer) was the first transistorized computer in the USA, completed in 1954. The computer was built by Jean Howard Felker of Bell Labs for the United States Air ...
, completed in January 1954, which used a single high-power output vacuum-tube amplifier to supply its 1-MHz clock power. The first fully transistorized computer was either the
Harwell CADET The Harwell CADET was the first fully transistorised computer in Europe, and may have been the first fully transistorised computer in the world. The electronics division of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, UK built the ...
, which first operated in February 1955, although the price paid for this was that it operated only at the slow speed of 58 kHz, or the prototype
IBM 604 The IBM 604 Electronic Calculating Punch was the world's first mass-produced electronic calculator along with its predecessor the IBM 603.
transistor calculator. The
Burroughs Corporation The Burroughs Corporation was a major American manufacturer of business equipment. The company was founded in 1886 as the American Arithmometer Company. In 1986, it merged with Sperry UNIVAC to form Unisys. The company's history paralleled many ...
claimed the
SM-65 Atlas The SM-65 Atlas was the first operational intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) developed by the United States and the first member of the Atlas rocket family. It was built for the U.S. Air Force by the Convair Division of General Dyna ...
ICBM An intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) is a ballistic missile with a range greater than , primarily designed for nuclear weapons delivery (delivering one or more thermonuclear warheads). Conventional, chemical, and biological weapons c ...
/ THOR ABLE guidance computer (MOD 1) that it delivered to the US Air Force at the
Cape Canaveral , image = cape canaveral.jpg , image_size = 300 , caption = View of Cape Canaveral from space in 1991 , map = Florida#USA , map_width = 300 , type =Cape , map_caption = Location in Florida , location ...
missile range in June 1957 was "the world's first operational transistorized computer".
MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the mo ...
's
Lincoln Laboratory The MIT Lincoln Laboratory, located in Lexington, Massachusetts, is a United States Department of Defense federally funded research and development center chartered to apply advanced technology to problems of national security. Research and dev ...
started developing a transistorized computer the
TX-0 The TX-0, for ''Transistorized Experimental computer zero'', but affectionately referred to as tixo (pronounced "tix oh"), was an early fully transistorized computer and contained a then-huge 64 K of 18-bit words of magnetic-core memory. Constru ...
in 1956. Further transistorized computers became operational in Japan (ETL Mark III, July 1956), in Canada (
DRTE Computer The DRTE Computer was a transistorized computer built at the Defence Research Telecommunications Establishment (DRTE), part of the Canadian Defence Research Board. It was one of the earlier fully transistorized machines, running in prototype form ...
, 1957), and in Austria, (
Mailüfterl Mailüfterl is a nickname for the Austrian ''Binär dezimaler Volltransistor-Rechenautomat'' (binary-decimal fully transistorized computing automaton), an early transistorized computer. Other early transistorized computers included TRADIC, Harwel ...
, May 1958), these being the first transistorized computers in Asia, Canada and mainland Europe respectively.


First commercial fully transistorized calculator

In April 1955, IBM announced the
IBM 608 The IBM 608 Transistor Calculator, a plugboard-programmable unit, was the first IBM product to use transistor circuits without any vacuum tubes and is believed to be the world's first all-transistorized calculator to be manufactured for the commerc ...
transistor calculator, which was first shipped in December 1957. IBM and several historians thus consider the IBM 608 the first all solid-state computing machine commercially marketed. The development of the 608 was preceded by the prototyping of an experimental all-
transistor upright=1.4, gate (G), body (B), source (S) and drain (D) terminals. The gate is separated from the body by an insulating layer (pink). A transistor is a semiconductor device used to Electronic amplifier, amplify or electronic switch, switch e ...
version of the 604. This was built and demonstrated in October 1954, but was not commercialized.


Early commercial fully transistorized large-scale computers

The Philco Transac models S-1000 scientific computer and S-2000 electronic data processing computer were early commercially produced large-scale all-transistor computers; they were announced in 1957 but did not ship until sometime after the fall of 1958. The Philco computer name "Transac" stands for Transistor-Automatic-Computer. Both of these Philco computer models used the surface-barrier transistor in their circuitry designs, the world's first high-frequency transistor suitable for high-speed computers. The
surface-barrier transistor The surface-barrier transistor is a type of transistor developed by Philco in 1953 as an improvement to the alloy-junction transistor and the earlier point-contact transistor. Like the modern Schottky transistor, it offered much higher speed than ...
was developed by Philco in 1953. RCA shipped the
RCA 501 The RCA 501 was a transistor computer manufactured by RCA beginning in 1958. History RCA's pioneering work in transistors in other products provided its engineers with the basis needed to design effective use of transistors in early solid-state e ...
its first all transistor computer in 1958. In Italy,
Olivetti Olivetti S.p.A. is an Italian manufacturer of computers, tablets, smartphones, printers and other such business products as calculators and fax machines. Headquartered in Ivrea, in the Metropolitan City of Turin, the company has been part of ...
's first commercial fully transistorized computer was the
Olivetti Elea The Elea was a series of mainframe computers Olivetti developed starting in the late 1950s. The system, made entirely with transistors for high performance, was conceived, designed and developed by a small group of researchers led by Mario Tchou ...
9003, sold from 1959.


IBM

IBM, which dominated the data processing industry through most of the 20th century, introduced its first commercial transistorized computers beginning in 1958, with the
IBM 7070 IBM 7070 was a decimal-architecture intermediate data-processing system that was introduced by IBM in 1958. It was part of the IBM 700/7000 series, and was based on discrete transistors rather than the vacuum tubes of the 1950s. It was the compan ...
, a ten-digit-word decimal machine. It was followed in 1959 by the
IBM 7090 The IBM 7090 is a second-generation transistorized version of the earlier IBM 709 vacuum tube mainframe computer that was designed for "large-scale scientific and technological applications". The 7090 is the fourth member of the IBM 700/7000 ser ...
, a
36-bit 36-bit computers were popular in the early mainframe computer era from the 1950s through the early 1970s. Starting in the 1960s, but especially the 1970s, the introduction of 7-bit ASCII and 8-bit EBCDIC led to the move to machines using 8-bit ...
scientific machine, the highly popular
IBM 1401 The IBM 1401 is a variable-wordlength decimal computer that was announced by IBM on October 5, 1959. The first member of the highly successful IBM 1400 series, it was aimed at replacing unit record equipment for processing data stored on pu ...
designed to replace punched card
tabulating machine The tabulating machine was an electromechanical machine designed to assist in summarizing information stored on punched cards. Invented by Herman Hollerith, the machine was developed to help process data for the 1890 U.S. Census. Later models w ...
s, and the desk-sized
1620 Events January–June * February 4 – Prince Bethlen Gabor signs a peace treaty with Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor. * May 17 – The first merry-go-round is seen at a fair (Philippapolis, Turkey). * June 3 – The ...
, a variable length decimal machine. IBM's 7000 and
1400 Year 1400 ( MCD) was a leap year starting on Thursday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. The year 1400 was not a leap year in the Proleptic Gregorian calendar. Events January–December * Henry IV of England ...
series included many variants on these designs, with different data formats, instruction sets and even different character encodings, but all were built using the same series of electronics modules, the IBM Standard Modular System (SMS).


DEC

Developers of the TX-0 left to form the
Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president unt ...
in 1957. Transistorized from the beginning, early DEC products included the
PDP-1 The PDP-1 (''Programmed Data Processor-1'') is the first computer in Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP series and was first produced in 1959. It is famous for being the computer most important in the creation of hacker culture at Massachusetts ...
,
PDP-6 The PDP-6, short for Programmed Data Processor model 6, is a computer developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) during 1963 and first delivered in the summer of 1964. It was an expansion of DEC's existing 18-bit systems to use a 36-bit da ...
,
PDP-7 The PDP-7 was a minicomputer produced by Digital Equipment Corporation as part of the PDP series. Introduced in 1964, shipped since 1965, it was the first to use their Flip-Chip technology. With a cost of , it was cheap but powerful by the st ...
and early
PDP-8 The PDP-8 is a 12-bit computing, 12-bit minicomputer that was produced by Digital Equipment Corporation, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). It was the first commercially successful minicomputer, with over 50,000 units being sold over the model's ...
s, the last starting the
minicomputer A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a class of smaller general purpose computers that developed in the mid-1960s and sold at a much lower price than mainframe and mid-size computers from IBM and its direct competitors. In a 1970 survey, ...
revolution. Later models of the PDP-8 beginning with PDP-8I in 1968 used integrated circuits making them third generation computers


System/360 and hybrid circuits

In 1964, IBM announced its
System/360 The IBM System/360 (S/360) is a family of mainframe computer systems that was announced by IBM on April 7, 1964, and delivered between 1965 and 1978. It was the first family of computers designed to cover both commercial and scientific applica ...
, a collection of computers covering a wide range of capabilities and prices with a unified architecture, to replace its earlier computers. Unwilling to bet the company on the immature monolithic IC technology of the early 1960s, IBM built the S/360 series using IBM's Solid Logic Technology (SLT) modules. SLT could package several individual transistors and individual diodes with deposited resistors and interconnections in a module one-half inch square, roughly the equivalent logic of the earlier
IBM Standard Modular System The Standard Modular System (SMS) is a system of standard transistorized circuit boards and mounting racks developed by IBM in the late 1950s, originally for the IBM 7030 Stretch. They were used throughout IBM's second-generation computers, per ...
card, but unlike monolithic IC manufacturing, the diodes and transistors in an SLT module were individually placed and connected at the end of each module's assembly.


Schools and hobbyists

First generation computers were largely out of reach of schools and hobbyists who wished to build their own, largely because of the cost of the large number of vacuum tubes required (though relay-based computer projects ''were'' undertaken). The fourth generation (VLSI) was also largely out of reach, too, due to most of the design work being inside the integrated circuit package (though this barrier, too, was later removed). So, second and third generation computer design (transistors and LSI) were perhaps the best suited to being undertaken by schools and hobbyists.A.Wilkinson (1968). Computer Models, Edward Arnold, UK, SBN 7131 1515 X


See also

*
History of computing hardware The history of computing hardware covers the developments from early simple devices to aid calculation to modern day computers. Before the 20th century, most calculations were done by humans. The first aids to computation were purely mechan ...
*
List of transistorized computers This is a list of transistorized computers, which were digital computers that used discrete transistors as their primary logic elements. Discrete transistors were a feature of logic design for computers from about 1960, when reliable transistors ...
*


References

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