The RCA BIZMAC was a vacuum tube computer manufactured by RCA from 1956 to 1962. Although RCA was noted for their pioneering work in transistors, RCA decided to build a vacuum tube computer instead of a transistorized computer. [1] It was the largest vacuum tube computer of its time in 1956, occupying 20,000 sq ft (1,900 m2) of floor space with up to 30,000 tubes, 70,000 diodes, and 35,000 magnetic cores. [2] It weighed about 26,500 lb (12,000 kg). [3]
In 1949, the Mutual Assistance Program (MAP)—later known as the Military Assistance Program—was started by the United States to provide military assistance and supplies to foreign countries needing to rebuild their military defenses after World War II.
In 1951, RCA was awarded a $4.5 million military contract to build a data processing machine to support the logistics necessary for the MAP. The result was the BIZMAC computer system.
The first BIZMAC machine was installed at the Ordnance Tank-Automotive Command (OTAC) in Detroit, Michigan in 1956. [4] Eventually, BIZMAC computer systems were also installed at Higbee Department Stores, Travelers Insurance Company, and New York Life Insurance Company. [2]
The huge BIZMAC system was very quickly made obsolete by faster and more reliable computer systems, including IBM's 705 computer as well as RCA's own transistorized 501 computer. The BIZMAC was taken offline from the OTAC in 1962. [2] Only about six BIZMAC computers were actually made. [5]
A unique feature of the BIZMAC was the use of hundreds of permanently mounted tape drives. This meant that tape data could be accessed immediately without constant mounting and dismounting individual tapes.
One of the original engineers of the BIZMAC was Arnold Spielberg, the father of film director and producer Steven Spielberg. Spielberg designed and patented an electronic library system used for searching data stored on magnetic tapes. [6]
The history of computing hardware covers the developments from early simple devices to aid calculation to modern day computers.
The TX-0, for Transistorized Experimental computer zero, but affectionately referred to as tixo, was an early fully transistorized computer and contained a then-huge 64K of 18-bit words of magnetic-core memory. Construction of the TX-0 began in 1955 and ended in 1956. It was used continually through the 1960s at MIT. The TX-0 incorporated around 3,600 Philco high-frequency surface-barrier transistors, the first transistor suitable for high-speed computers. The TX-0 and its direct descendant, the original PDP-1, were platforms for pioneering computer research and the development of what would later be called computer "hacker" culture. For MIT, this was the first computer to provide a system console which allowed for direct interaction, as opposed to previous computers, which required the use of punched card as a primary interface for programmers debugging their programs. Members of MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club, "the very first hackers at MIT", reveled in the interactivity afforded by the console, and were recruited by Marvin Minsky to work on this and other systems used by Minsky's AI group.
The UNIVAC I was the first general-purpose electronic digital computer design for business application produced in the United States. It was designed principally by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, the inventors of the ENIAC. Design work was started by their company, Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC), and was completed after the company had been acquired by Remington Rand. In the years before successor models of the UNIVAC I appeared, the machine was simply known as "the UNIVAC".
UNIVAC was a line of electronic digital stored-program computers starting with the products of the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation. Later the name was applied to a division of the Remington Rand company and successor organizations.
The Cyclone is a vacuum-tube computer, built by Iowa State College at Ames, Iowa. The computer was commissioned in July 1959. It was based on the IAS architecture developed by John von Neumann. The Cyclone was based on ILLIAC, the University of Illinois Automatic Computer. The Cyclone used 40-bit words, used two 20-bit instructions per word, and each instruction had an eight-bit op-code and a 12-bit operand or address field. In general IAS-based computers were not code compatible with each other, although originally math routines which ran on the ILLIAC would also run on the Cyclone.
The UNIVAC 1105 was a follow-on computer to the UNIVAC 1103A introduced by Sperry Rand in September 1958. The UNIVAC 1105 used 21 types of vacuum tubes, 11 types of diodes, 10 types of transistors, and three core types.
The IBM 709 is a computer system that was initially announced by IBM in January 1957 and first installed during August 1958. The 709 was an improved version of its predecessor, the IBM 704, and was the third of the IBM 700/7000 series of scientific computers. The improvements included overlapped input/output, indirect addressing, and three "convert" instructions which provided support for decimal arithmetic, leading zero suppression, and several other operations. The 709 had 32,768 words of 36-bit magnetic core memory and could execute 42,000 add or subtract instructions per second. It could multiply two 36-bit integers at a rate of 5000 per second.
The BRLESC I was one of the last of the first-generation electronic computers. It was built by the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL) at Aberdeen Proving Ground with assistance from the National Bureau of Standards, and was designed to take over the computational workload of EDVAC and ORDVAC, which themselves were successors of ENIAC. It began operation in 1962. The Ballistic Research Laboratory became a part of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory in 1992.
The TRADIC was the first transistorized computer in the USA, completed in 1954.
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 earlier transistors and used metal–semiconductor junctions, but unlike the schottky transistor, both junctions were metal–semiconductor junctions.
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, were bulky and unreliable. A second-generation computer, through the late 1950s and 1960s featured circuit boards filled with individual transistors and magnetic-core memory. These machines remained the mainstream design into the late 1960s, when integrated circuits started appearing and led to the third-generation computer.
Mailüfterl is a nickname for the Austrian Binär dezimaler Volltransistor-Rechenautomat, an early transistorized computer. Other early transistorized computers included TRADIC, Harwell CADET and TX-0.
The Datamatic Division of Honeywell announced the H-800 electronic computer in 1958. The first installation occurred in 1960. A total of 89 units were delivered. The H-800 design was part of a family of 48-bit word, three-address instruction format computers that descended from the Datamatic 1000, which was a joint Honeywell and Raytheon project started in 1955. The 1800 and 1800-II were follow-on designs to the H-800.
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 (1924–1961), with industrial design by Ettore Sottsass. The ELEA 9001 was the first solid-state computer designed and manufactured in Italy. The acronym ELEA stood for Elaboratore Elettronico Aritmetico and was chosen with reference to the ancient Greek colony of Elea, home of the Eleatic school of philosophy. About forty units were placed with customers. In August 1964, only a few years after releasing the 9003, Olivetti's mainframe business was sold to GE.
Arnold Meyer Spielberg was an American electrical engineer who was instrumental in contributions to "real-time data acquisition and recording that significantly contributed to the definition of modern feedback and control processes". For General Electric he designed, with his colleague Charles Propster, the GE-225 mainframe computer in 1959. He cited as his greatest contribution the first computer-controlled "point of sale" cash register. His children include filmmaker Steven Spielberg, screenwriter Anne Spielberg and producer Nancy Spielberg.
A vacuum-tube computer, now termed a first-generation computer, is a computer that uses vacuum tubes for logic circuitry. While the history of mechanical aids to computation goes back centuries, if not millennia, the history of vacuum tube computers is confined to the middle of the 20th century. Lee De Forest invented the triode in 1906. The first example of using vacuum tubes for computation, the Atanasoff–Berry computer, was demonstrated in 1939. Vacuum-tube computers were initially one-of-a-kind designs, but commercial models were introduced in the 1950s and sold in volumes ranging from single digits to thousands of units. By the early 1960s vacuum tube computers were obsolete, superseded by second-generation transistorized computers.
The RCA 501 was a transistor computer manufactured by RCA beginning in 1958.
Philco was one of the pioneers of transistorized computers, also known as second generation computers. After the company developed the surface barrier transistor, which was much faster than previous point-contact types, it was awarded contracts for military and government computers. Commercialized derivatives of some of these designs became successful business and scientific computers. The TRANSAC Model S-1000 was released as a scientific computer. The TRANSAC S-2000 mainframe computer system was first produced in 1958, and a family of compatible machines, with increasing performance, was released over the next several years.
The Société d'électronique et d'automatisme (SEA) was an early French computer manufacturer established in 1947 by electrical engineer François-Henri Raymond, which designed and put into operation a significant portion of the first computers in France during the 1950s.