| Early 1944... Eniac (electronic numerical integrator and calculator ) was placed in operation at the Moore School. By today's standards for electronic computers the ENIAC was a grotesque monster. Its thirty separate units, plus power supply and forced-air cooling, weighed over thirty tons. Its 19,000 vacuum tubes, 1,500 relays, and hundreds of thousands of resistors, capacitors, and inductors consumed almost 200 kilowatts of electrical power. |
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June 1951...
The first UNIVAC I mainframe computer was delivered to the Census Bureau ...the central processor unit was about the size of a one-car garage: 14 feet by 8 feet by 8.5 feet high. It was a walk-in computer. The vacuum tubes generated an enormous amount of heat, so a high capacity chilled water and blower air conditioning system was required to cool the unit. The complete system had 5200 vacuum tubes, weighed 29,000 pounds, and consumed 125 kilowatts of electrical power.
UNIVAC came to the public's attention in 1952, when CBS used one to predict the outcome of the presidential election. The computer correctly predicted the Eisenhower victory, |
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October 1954....
Just over 50 years ago IBM introduces the model 705... the last of its vacuum tube based systems but the first with magnetic core memory. The 705 central cabinet held 24-kilobytes of core memory (instructions & data) having a cycle time of 12 usec (micro-seconds) and sells for over a million dollars ( $10 million in todays dollars)... For comparison...todays desktop PC (inserted to scale in accompanying photo) typically has over 240-megabytes of memory on four chips, with 3 nsec (nano-seconds) cycle times ...and sells for less than a thousand dollars. |
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| April 1956...A small west coast company (Ampex) startles the industry with its introduction of the VRX-1000, the worlds first video recorder. |
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