What is eniac and what year was it created? History of the ENIAC (Digital Integrator and Calculator) computer. · the program, like numbers, must be written in binary code

The Eniak machine (ENIAC, an abbreviation for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), like Howard Aiken's Mark-1, was also intended to solve ballistics problems. But in the end, she turned out to be capable of solving problems from a wide variety of areas.
ENIAC
From the very beginning of the war, employees of the US Department of Defense Ballistic Research Laboratory, located in the area of ​​the Aberdeen Proving Ground, pc. Maryland, worked to create ballistic tables, so necessary for artillerymen on the battlefield. The importance of these tables cannot be overestimated. With their help, artillerymen could make adjustments when aiming a gun, taking into account the distance to the target, its height above sea level, as well as meteorological conditions - wind and air temperature. However, constructing the tables required very long and tedious calculations - to calculate just one trajectory it was necessary to perform at least 750 multiplication operations, and each table included at least 2000 trajectories. True, the differential analyzer made it possible to speed up the calculations somewhat, but this device gave only approximate results, to clarify which dozens of people were then involved working with ordinary desktop calculators.
The war grew, military developments needed to be accelerated, the laboratory could not cope with the work and in the end was forced to ask for help. A satellite computing center was established at the nearby Technical High School of the University of Pennsylvania. The school had a differential analyzer, but two employees of the computer center, John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, set out to come up with something better.


John W. Mauchly(left) and J. Presper Eckert(right)
Mauchly, a physicist with a passion for meteorology, had long dreamed of creating a device that would allow the use of statistical methods for weather forecasting. Before the war, he made several simple digital calculating devices using vacuum tubes. Perhaps an interest in electronic computers arose under the influence of the ideas of John Atanasoff, who worked in the state. Iowa. In June 1941, Mauchly stayed with Atanasoff for five days, watching him and his assistant Clifford Berry work on a prototype computer containing about 300 vacuum tubes.
Whether Atanasoff's influence was significant or not - the issue later became the subject of a legal battle - it was Pres Eckert who inspired Mauchly to do this work. 12 years younger than Mauchly, Eckert was truly a virtuoso in technology. At the age of eight he built a miniature radio. As Mauchly later recalled, Eckert convinced him that “the dreams of a computer could be realized in practice.”
In August 1942, Mauchly wrote something like a five-page application, which briefly outlined his joint proposal with Eckert to create a high-speed computer using vacuum tubes. The application was lost in the authorities. However, a few months later, Lieutenant Herman Goldstein, a military representative assigned to the school, accidentally heard about this idea. At that time, the army was in dire need of new ballistic tables. Artillerymen reported from North Africa that due to the very soft ground, the guns rolled far away during recoil and the shells did not reach the target.

Goldstein, who taught mathematics at the University of Michigan before the war, immediately recognized the significance of the proposed computer project and began lobbying on behalf of the military command to get the project accepted for development. Finally, on April 9, 1943—the day Eckert turned 24—the Army signed a $400,000 contract with the school to build the Eniak computer.
The team working on this project eventually grew to 50 people. Mauchly was the main consultant of the project, Eckert was the chief designer. Different in character and habits, these two people complemented each other perfectly. Quick and sociable, Mauchly generated ideas, and reserved, cool and cautious, Eckert subjected these ideas to rigorous analysis, wanting to make sure that they were effective. “He had an incredible ability to translate everything to a practical level, using simple technical means“This is how one of the group members described Eckert, “Presper was not the kind of person who could get lost in a thousand equations.”
The design of the machine looked fantastically complex - it was expected that it would contain 17,468 lamps. This abundance of lamps was partly due to the fact that Eniac had to work with decimal numbers. Mauchly preferred the decimal number system because he wanted “the machine to be understandable to man.” However, such a large number of lamps, which overheated and failed, led to frequent breakdowns. With 17 thousand lamps simultaneously operating at a frequency of 100 thousand pulses per second, 1.7 billion situations arose every second in which at least one of the lamps could not work. Eckert solved this problem by borrowing a technique that was widely used in the operation of large electric organs in concert halls: the lamps began to be supplied with slightly less voltage, and the number of accidents dropped to one or two per week.

Eckert also developed a program for strictly monitoring the health of the equipment. Each of the more than 100 thousand electronic components of the 30-ton machine was carefully checked, then they were all carefully placed in place and soldered, and sometimes re-soldered more than once. This work required great effort from all members of the group, including Mauchly, its “think tank.”


At the end of 1945, when ENIAC was finally assembled and ready for its first official test, the war it was designed to serve was over. However, the very task chosen to test the machine - calculations that were supposed to answer the question of the fundamental possibility of creating a hydrogen bomb - indicated that the role of the computer in the post-war and Cold War years did not decrease, but rather increased.
Eniac successfully passed the tests, processing about a million IBM punch cards. Two months later, the car was shown to the press. In terms of its size (about 6 m in height and 26 m in length), this computer was more than twice the size of Howard Aiken's Mark-1.
Aiken Howard Hathaway
However, the double increase in size was accompanied by a thousandfold increase in performance. In the words of one admiring reporter, Eniac worked “faster than thought.”


Before Eniak had time to go into operation, Mauchly and Eckert were already working on a new computer at the request of the military. The main disadvantage of the Eniak computer was the difficulties that arose when changing the instructions entered into it, i.e. the program. Volume internal memory the machine was barely sufficient to store the numerical data used in the calculations. This meant that programs had to be literally “soldered” into complex electronic circuits cars. If you wanted to go from calculating ballistic tables to calculating wind tunnel parameters, you had to run around the room, connecting and disconnecting hundreds of contacts, like on a manual telephone switchboard. Depending on the complexity of the program, such work took from several hours to two days. This was a strong enough argument to abandon attempts to use Eniak as a general-purpose computer.

Today, computer technology has entered people's lives so deeply that it is perceived as something obligatory and has existed for a long time in human society. However, the very first computer in the world actually appeared quite recently. Especially if you compare this time period with the history of human civilization as a whole, which goes back many millennia.

ENIAC

The first computer is considered to be ENIAC. This is an abbreviation for the full name of the device - electronic digital computer and integrator. On English language- Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer. This electronic machine was introduced into service in the USA in 1946. Quite a lot of money was invested in the production of ENIAC on the scale of that time. The total investment amounted to half a million dollars.

The construction of the machine took place in 1943-1945, during the Second World War that was raging at that time. Like most high-tech, modern inventions, the computer was created for military needs, namely, artillery and aviation. His main task was to calculate ballistic tables. Subsequently, smart technology began to be used in the project to create a hydrogen bomb, as well as for peaceful purposes - to analyze radiation from space.

Leviathan

If we compare ENIAC with modern personal computers, then he can be called a real leviathan. Its dimensions were gigantic, comparable to the size of the largest animal on earth - the whale. In particular:

• area 85 meters2;
• weight 28 tons;
• length 30 meters;
• energy consumption up to 200 kW;
• number of electronic tubes - 19 thousand pieces.

If we compare its energy consumption with something ordinary, then it was equal to the needs of a huge supermarket in the winter season. The computer consisted of 42 metal cabinets, the internal contents of which were cooled by many fans. Five mobile stands on wheels were provided for equipment diagnostics. And all this was entangled with many cables. Programming and setting up the very first computer in the world was carried out in a similar way to old-fashioned corded telephone switches. No keyboards or monitors. Of course he didn't.

How did he work

ENIAC was assembled in Pennsylvania on the campus of the University of Philadelphia. Its creators were John Macley (developed the computer architecture) and J. Presper Eckert (implemented the theoretical developments of John Macley).

The computer could handle ten-digit numbers. Its design included electromechanical elements: a punch card reader and a puncher. They were needed to output and input information. Of course, the device often failed due to a large number of lamps, overheating or high humidity. However, ENIAC worked for more than ten years and became a solid basis for further development computer equipment.

There are opinions that thanks to this smart machine, the dreams of Gottfried Leibniz and the ideas of the mathematician J. Von Neumann about a binary device that solved all questions with “yes” or “no” answers came true. Of course, before it there were earlier attempts in this area, but it was the ENIAC designed in the USA with its functionality that is considered the world's first computer.

To simplify the process of specifying programs, Mauchly and Eckert began to design new car, which could store the program in its memory. In 1945, the famous mathematician John von Neumann was involved in the work, who prepared a report on this machine. In this report, von Neumann clearly and simply formulated general principles functioning of universal computing devices, i.e. computers. This was the first operational machine built on vacuum tubes and was officially put into operation on February 15, 1946. They tried to use this machine to solve some problems prepared by von Neumann and related to the atomic bomb project. She was then transported to Aberdeen Proving Ground, where she operated until 1955.

ENIAC became the first representative of the 1st generation of computers. Any classification is conditional, but most experts agreed that generations should be distinguished based on the elemental base on which the machines are built. Thus, the first generation appears to be tube machines.

The structure and operation of a computer according to the “von Neumann principle”

It is necessary to note the enormous role of the American mathematician von Neumann in the development of first-generation technology. It was necessary to understand the strengths and weaknesses of ENIAC and make recommendations for subsequent developments. The report by von Neumann and his colleagues G. Goldstein and A. Burks (June 1946) clearly formulated the requirements for the structure of computers. Let us note the most important of them:

· machines using electronic elements should operate not in the decimal, but in the binary number system;

· the program, like the source data, must be located in the machine’s memory;

· the program, like numbers, must be written in binary code;

· the difficulties of the physical implementation of a storage device, the speed of which corresponds to the speed of operation of logical circuits, require a hierarchical organization of memory (that is, the allocation of RAM, intermediate and long-term memory);

· an arithmetic device (processor) is constructed on the basis of circuits that perform the addition operation; the creation of special devices for performing other arithmetic and other operations is impractical;

· the machine uses a parallel principle of organizing the computational process (operations on numbers are performed simultaneously in all digits).

The following figure shows what the connections between computer devices should be according to von Neumann's principles (single lines show control connections, dotted lines show information connections).

Almost all of von Neumann’s recommendations were subsequently used in machines of the first three generations; their totality was called “von Neumann architecture.” The first computer to embody von Neumann's principles was built in 1949 by the English researcher Maurice Wilkes. Since then, computers have become much more powerful, but the vast majority of them are made in accordance with the principles that John von Neumann outlined in his 1945 report.

New cars of the first generation replaced each other quite quickly. In 1951, the first Soviet electronic computer MESM, with an area of ​​about 50 square meters, began operation. MESM had 2 types of memory: random access memory, in the form of 4 panels 3 meters high and 1 meter wide; and long-term memory in the form of a magnetic drum with a capacity of 5000 numbers. In total, the MESM had 6,000 vacuum tubes, and it was possible to work with them only after 1.5-2 hours after turning on the machine. Data input was carried out using magnetic tape, and output was carried out using a digital printing device coupled to memory. MESM could perform 50 mathematical operations per second, memorize random access memory 31 numbers and 63 commands (there were 12 different commands in total), and consumed power equal to 25 kilowatts.

The capabilities of the first generation machines were quite modest. Thus, their performance according to modern standards was low: from 100 (Ural-1) to 20,000 operations per second (M-20 in 1959). These figures were determined primarily by the inertia of vacuum tubes and the imperfection of storage devices. The amount of RAM was extremely small - on average 2,048 numbers (words), this was not enough even to accommodate complex programs, not to mention data. Intermediate memory was organized on bulky and low-speed magnetic drums of relatively small capacity (5,120 words for BESM-1). Printing devices and data input units also worked slowly. If we dwell in more detail on input-output devices, we can say that from the beginning of the appearance of the first computers, a contradiction emerged between the high speed of central devices and the low speed of external devices. In addition, it was revealed

imperfection and inconvenience of these devices. The first data carrier in computers, as is known, was a punched card. Then perforated paper tapes or simply punched paper tapes appeared. They came from telegraph technology after early XIX V. Chicago father and son Charles and Howard Crums invented the teletype.

The first generation of computers, these tough and slow-moving computers, were the pioneers of computer technology. They quickly disappeared from the scene, as they did not find wide commercial application due to unreliability, high cost, and difficulty in programming.

) commissioned by the Ballistic Research Laboratory (English) US Army for calculating shooting tables. Unlike the complex created in 1941 by the German engineer Conrad Zuse, which used mechanical relays, ENIAC used vacuum lamps as the basis of its element base.

By February 1944, all the diagrams and drawings of the future computer were ready, and a group of engineers led by Eckert and Mauchly began to translate the idea into hardware. The group also included:

• Robert F. Shaw (function tables)
• Jeffrey Chuan Chu (division/square root module)
• Thomas Kite Sharpless (Chief Programmer)
• Arthur Burks (multiplication module)
• Harry Huskey (data output reader module)
• Jack Davis (batteries)
• John von Neumann joined the project in September 1944 as a scientific consultant. Based on an analysis of the shortcomings, ENIAC made significant proposals for the creation of a new, more advanced machine - EDVAC

In mid-July 1944, Mauchly and Eckert assembled the first two “accumulators,” modules that were used to add numbers. Putting them together, they multiplied the two numbers 5 and 1000 and got the correct result. This result was demonstrated to the leadership of the Institute and the Ballistic Laboratory and proved to all skeptics that an electronic computer could indeed be built.

The computer was completely ready only in the fall of 1945. Since the war was already over by that time and there was no longer an urgent need for quickly calculating firing tables, the US military department decided to use ENIAC in calculations for the development of thermonuclear weapons.

Being a top-secret project of the US Army, the computer was presented to the public and press only many months after the end of the war - on February 14, 1946. A few months later - on November 9, 1946 - ENIAC was disassembled and transported from the University of Pennsylvania in Aberdeen to the US Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, where from July 29, 1947 it successfully worked for many more years and was finally turned off on October 2, 1955 at 23 :45.

At the Ballistic Laboratory at ENIAC, calculations were performed on the problem of thermonuclear weapons, weather forecasts in the USSR to predict the direction of nuclear fallout in the event of a nuclear war, engineering calculations, and of course firing tables, including firing tables for nuclear weapons.

Six girls became the first ENIAC programmers:

• Kathleen Rita McNulty
• Betty Jean Jennings?!
• Frances Elizabeth Snyder?!
• Francis Bilas

Usage

As a test, ENIAC was the first to be tasked with mathematical modeling thermonuclear explosion of a superbomb according to the Ulam-Teller hypothesis. Von Neumann, who simultaneously worked as a consultant at both the Los Alamos Laboratory and the Moore Institute, suggested that Teller's group use ENIAC for calculations back in early 1945. Solving the problem of thermonuclear weapons required such a huge amount of calculations that no electromechanical calculators at the Laboratory’s disposal could cope with it. In August 1945, Los Alamos Laboratory physicists Nicholas Metropolis and Stanley Frenkel (English) visited the Moore Institute, and Herman Goldstein, along with his wife Adele, who worked as a programmer on the team and was the author of the first ENIAC manual, introduced them to the ENIAC programming technique. After that, they returned to Los Alamos, where they began working on a program called “The Los Alamos Problem.”

ENIAC's performance was too low for full-fledged modeling, so Metropolis and Frenkel greatly simplified the equation, ignoring many physical effects and trying to at least approximately calculate only the first phase of the explosion of a deuterium-tritium mixture in one-dimensional space. The details and results of the calculations performed in November–December 1945 are still classified. ENIAC was tasked with solving the most difficult differential equation, which required about a million punched cards to enter the initial data. The input problem was divided into several parts so that the data could fit into the computer's memory. Intermediate results were displayed on punched cards and, after reconnection, were fed back into the machine. In April 1946, Teller's group discussed the results of the calculations and concluded that they showed quite reassuringly (albeit very approximately) the possibility of creating a hydrogen bomb.

Stanislav Ulam was present at the discussion of the calculation results. Amazed by the speed of ENIAC’s work, he proposed to make calculations on a thermonuclear explosion using the Monte Carlo method. In 1947, 9 calculations were performed at ENIAC using this method with various initial parameters. After this, the Monte Carlo method began to be used in all calculations related to the development of thermonuclear weapons.

In 1949, von Neumann used ENIAC to calculate numbers and e accurate to 2000 decimal places. Von Neumann was interested in the statistical distribution of the digits in these numbers. It was assumed that the digits in these numbers appear with equal probability, which means that computers can generate truly random numbers that can be used as input parameters for Monte Carlo calculations. Calculations for a number e were carried out in July 1949, and for the number π - in one day at the beginning of September. The results showed that “the numbers in the number π are in random order, but with the number e everything was much worse."

At ENIAC in the spring of 1950, the first successful numerical weather forecast was made by a team of American meteorologists Jules Charney (English), Philip Thomson, Larry Gates, Norwegian Ragnar Furtoft (English) and mathematician John von Neumann. They used simplified atmospheric flow models based on the eddy velocity equation for barotropic gas. This simplification reduced the computational complexity of the problem and made it possible to perform calculations using the computing power available at the time. Calculations were carried out starting on March 5, 1950, for 5 weeks, five days a week in three 8-hour shifts. It took several more months to analyze and evaluate the results. A description of the calculations and analysis of the results were presented in the work “Numerical Integration of Barotropic Vorticity Equation”, published on November 1, 1950 in the journal Tellus. The article mentions that the weather forecast for the next 24 hours at ENIAC was completed 24 hours in advance, meaning the forecast could barely keep up with reality. Most of the time was spent printing punch cards and sorting them. During the calculations, we had to make changes to the program on the fly and wait for the burnt out lamps to be replaced. With proper optimization of ENIAC's operation, the work said, the calculation could be completed in 12 hours, and with more advanced machines - in 30 minutes. For the forecast, weather maps over the territory of the United States and Canada for January 5, 30, 31 and February 13, 1949 were used. After the calculations, the forecast maps were compared with the real ones to assess the quality of the forecast.

Features, architecture and programming

ENIAC took 200,000 man-hours and US$486,804.22 to build. In total, the complex included 17,468 lamps 16 various types, 7200 silicon diodes, 1500 relays, 70,000 resistors and 10,000 capacitors.

Calculations were carried out in the decimal system; after careful analysis, it was given preference over the binary system. The computer operated with numbers with a maximum length of 20 digits.

Many Institute specialists skeptically predicted that with so many lamps in the system, the computer simply would not be able to work at all. long time to produce a worthwhile result - there are too many points of failure. The failure of one lamp, one capacitor or resistor meant the entire machine stopped working, in total there were 1.8 billion different failure modes every second. Before this, humanity had not created a single device of such complexity and with such a requirement for reliability. In order for vacuum tubes to burn out less often, Eckert came up with the idea of ​​applying a minimum voltage to them - 5.7 volts instead of the nominal 6.3 volts, and after performing the calculations, ENIAC continued to work, maintaining the tubes in a “warm” state, so that the temperature difference during cooling and incandescence did not lead to their burnout. Approximately 2-3 lamps burned out per week, and the average lamp operating time was 2500 hours. Particularly high demands were placed on the selection of radio components and the quality of installation and soldering. So the engineers ensured that ENIAC worked for at least 20 hours between breakdowns - not much by today’s standards, but for every 20 hours of operation ENIAC performed a month’s worth of mechanical computer work.

In January 1944, Eckert made the first sketch of a second computer with a more advanced design, in which the program was stored in the computer's memory rather than generated using switches and rearrangement of blocks, as in ENIAC. In the summer of 1944, the military curator of the project, Herman Goldstein, accidentally met the famous mathematician von Neumann and attracted him to work on the machine. Von Neumann contributed to the project from a rigorous theoretical perspective. Thus, the theoretical and engineering foundation was created for the next computer model called EDVAC with a stored program. The contract with the US Army for the creation of this vehicle was signed in April 1946.

Von Neumann's scientific work "First Draft Report on EDVAC", published on June 30, 1945, served as an impetus for the creation of computers in the USA (EDVAC, BINAC, UNIVAC I) and in England (EDSAC). Because of its enormous scientific prestige, the idea of ​​a computer with a program stored in memory is attributed to von Neumann (“von Neumann architecture”), although the priority actually belongs to Eckert, who proposed the use of memory using mercury acoustic delay lines. Von Neumann joined the project later and simply gave Mauchly and Eckert's engineering solutions an academic scientific meaning.

From September 16, 1948, ENIAC became a (very primitive) stored program computer. Following von Neumann's June 1947 proposal, two function tables were used to store all ENIAC instructions so that the instructions could be called as subroutines during code execution. The computer began to work somewhat slower, but its programming was greatly simplified. The old reconnection method has not been used since then.

In July 1953, a binary-decimal memory module on magnetic cores was connected to ENIAC, which increased the computer's RAM capacity from 20 to 120 number-words.

Influence

ENIAC could not be called a perfect computer. The machine was created in wartime in great haste from scratch in the absence of any previous experience in creating such devices. ENIAC was built in a single copy, and the engineering solutions implemented in ENIAC were not used in subsequent computer designs. ENIAC - hurry up the computer not the first, but the “zero” generation. The significance of ENIAC lies simply in its existence, which proved the possibility of building a completely electronic computer, capable of operating long enough to justify the cost of its construction and produce tangible results.

In March 1946, Eckert and Mauchly, due to disputes with the University of Pennsylvania over the ENIAC patents and the EDVAC they were working on at the time, decided to leave the Moore Institute and go into private business in computer building, creating the Electronic Control Company, which was later renamed Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation. As a “parting gift” and at the request of the US Army, they gave a series of lectures at the institute on computer design under the general title “Theory and Methods of Electronic Design.” digital computers", drawing on his experience building ENIAC and designing EDVAC. These lectures went down in history as the “Lectures of the Moore School.” Lectures - essentially the first in the history of mankind computer courses- read in the summer of 1946 from July 8 to August 31 only for a narrow circle of specialists in the USA and Great Britain who worked on the same problem in different government departments and scientific institutes, 28 people in total. The lectures served as the starting point for the creation of the successful computing systems CALDIC, SEAC, SWAC, ILLIAC, and the Whirlwind computer in the 40s and 50s (English), used by the US Air Force in the world's first computer system Air Defense SAGE.

Computer memory

see also

• EDSAC - British computer, first to implement the "von Neumann architecture" (1948)
• EDVAC - the next computer of the Moore Institute, created for the US Army on the principles of "von Neumann architecture" (1949)

Literature

• Herman H. Goldstine. The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann. - Princeton University Press, 1980. - 365 p. - ISBN 9780691023670.(English)

• Nancy B. Stern. From Eniac to UNIVAC: An Appraisal of the Eckert-Mauchy Computers. - Digital Press, 1981. - 286 p. - ISBN 0932376142.(English)

• William Aspray. John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing. - MIT Press, 1990. - 394 p. - ISBN 0262011212.(English)

• Scott McCartney.

ENIAC

The world's first electronic computer

ENIAC, the first universal electronic digital computer, pictured above, was installed at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. It weighed about 30 tons and occupied 15,000 square meters of living space.

ENIAC contained more than 19,000 vacuum tubes. Its computing power was 5000 operations per second. As a result, calculations on ENIAC took a long time. Operators wired connectors on boards to program the required operations and entered numbers used in calculations by turning dials until they matched the correct number.

By today's standards, the ENIAC was slow, but 60 times faster than the mechanical differential analyzers it replaced, and was a great achievement for its time. ENIAC "rules" in the field computer technology between 1949 and 1952, when it served as the primary computer for solving the nation's scientific problems. It was the main tool for calculating all ballistic tables for the US Army and Air Force.

ENIAC was moved to the Ballistics Research Laboratory (BRL) in 1946. He was hardly used for solving “complex nuclear problems,” but he was involved in calculating ballistic tables for the White Sands Missile Range.

There were many new products in the research laboratory. Around 1958/1959 BRL decided to build a very high-performance computer for scientific calculations. It became BRLESC (BRL Electronic Scientific Computer). It was very expensive and powerful computer and was created on the basis of vacuum tubes at a time when all commercial computers were switching to the production of semiconductor devices.

BINAC

The next car produced by the team Eckert & Mauchly , became Binac , computer special purpose. Only one copy was created. Binac implemented four important innovations:

• the first computer to use parallel logic instead of serial logic;
• the first computer that can be programmed internally;
• the first computer to use magnetic tape;
• the first computer that was built on semiconductor elements.

Internal programming eliminated the time-consuming and tedious task of changing the task at hand by reconnecting exposed wiring cables.

In parallel logic systems, if you want to add two three-digit numbers, each number represents three addition circuits, one for each column. In a serial machine, columns are added one at a time, sequentially. Such a device reduced the number of system elements, which led to improved fault tolerance of the computer and made it cheaper.

IN Binac a limitation on the diameter of the magnetic tape reels was used. Small, two-inch reels became the forerunners of a complex system for entering and storing data on magnetic tape.

Partially, Binac achieved computation speeds comparable to the speed of sequential machines built on semiconductor diodes instead of vacuum tubes.

All serial machines were giant networks switched by wires. Vacuum tubes were still used to amplify signals, but the first use of crystal diodes, back in 1948, formed the basis of modern solid-state computers with their vastly increased processing speeds and greatly reduced size, power, and cooling requirements.

The memory used in BINAC was a mercury tank. The design of this storage device was based on a very simple principle: an electrical pulse can be converted into a sound pulse (using a piezoelectric quartz crystal). The sound pulse passes through the tank filled with mercury at a relatively low speed and can be converted back into an electrical pulse by another crystal, amplified and transmitted back to the tank. The “bit” of information continues to circulate until the computer requests it. Mercury Delay Memory also used in Univac

Part 2. Eniac and Binac | 2013-08-16 07:10:28 | Super User | Development of computer technology | https://site/media/system/images/new.png | ENIAC The world's first electronic computer ENIAC|