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To: Pigboy who wrote (98137)	2/3/2000 9:34:00 AM
From: Tony Viola	Respond to of 186894

PB, the Eniac was an all vacuum tube computer, filled a large room. I think the Iowa State one was mechanical (had to be, unless it was made of relays). OH, also, no fiber optics in those old timers. Tony

To: Pigboy who wrote (98137)	2/3/2000 1:26:00 PM
From: carl a. mehr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Pigboy, Here is the text that you may have overlook in the reference I gave: <<In late 1939, Atanasoff teamed up with Berry to build the prototype, of the first computing machine to use electricity, vacuum tubes, binary numbers, and capacitors in a rotating drum which held the electrical charge for the memory. The brilliant and inventive Berry, with his background in electronics and mechanical construction skills was the ideal partner for Atanasoff. The prototype won the design team a grant of $850 to build a full-scale computer, they spent the next two years further improving the Atanasoff Berry Computer, which ended up being the size of a desk, weighing 700 pounds, having over 300 vacuum tubes, and a mile of wire. It could do about one operation every 15 seconds, today a computer today can do 150 billion operations in 15 seconds. Too large to go anywhere, it remained in the basement of the physics department, where it was built, the war effort prevented Atanasoff from finishing the patent process and doing any further work on the ABC. The ABC, was dismantled when it's storage space in the physics building was needed.>> Transister was not needed to make the early day computers. Vacuum tubes did the job. In 1956 and 1957 I was a Customer Engineer for IBM in Santa Monica. I helped service an IBM 704 and an IBM 705 at Hughes Aircraft in Inglewood and also the same type of machines at North American in Downey. Each of these computers consisted of 5-6 thousand vacuum tubes and required an awful lot of air-conditioning. Yes, I was there in the middle of world where it was all happening as a young person with lots of energy. The high speed printers drove me nuts, however, and forced me to make a quick exit for college. I have seen the evolution of computers from Day One and the speed is getting dizzying! I am so confident of what the future holds for shareholders of Intel, Microsoft and Cisco, that I multiply the values of those stocks in my portfolio by 10,12 and 27, respectively, to obtain an approximate value of what my portfolio will look like in 5 years. I will probably error on the low side, because the next 5 years will without doubt be even more dynamic than the last. It has never been easier to prosper. If I now could only sell my name...humble eCarl

To: Pigboy who wrote (98137)	2/4/2000 1:44:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

Pigboy - Transistors did not make significant inroads into computers until the 60s, and even then the "second generation" (solid state) machines were based on germanium not silicon. Early GE and Burroughs germanium machines were extremely sensitive to environment as the switching times for the gates was affected by ambient temperature, and so race conditions would appear if the temperature shifted a few degrees. The basic modules (flip-flops, shift registers etc.) were built on small replaceable cards which were functionally replaced later on by integrated circuits - for a while, during the transition to 3rd generation machines (IC based, although RTL was initially more popular than TTL), the second generation machines were upgraded by simply replacing the diode, capacitor and transistor cards with a matching card containing a single IC... Vacuum tube computers were fairly stable at that time. The NASA Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs made extensive use of IBM 655s which were tube based, and NASA did not move much to solid state until well into the Apollo program.