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HITAC (HItachi Transistor Automatic Computer) is the designation for the majority of Hitachi large and midrange computer models spanning several decades. The HITAC 301, released in May 1958, was Hitachi's first fully transistorized computer model. Earlier Hitachi computers made use of semiconductors known as parametrons.
Hitachi Ltd. (now referred to as Hitachi), first began research in analog computers in 1951 with digital Computers following in 1956. As a prototype for the parametron logic circuit, the HIPAC-MK-1 was developed. The main transmission lines designed by Tadami power development utilized these as tensiometers. It was then that as Parametron calculators, the HIPAC 101 and HIPAC 103 became commercialized products. Parallel research in transistor computers soon became commercialized as well.
As a base, the ETL Mark IV transistorized computer model was introduced and was the first commercialized in 1959. The Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association produced this model intended for business use. In the following year, the HITAC 501 was released and now supplies the Eastern Osaka Kansai Electric substation as a control system. Additionally, the Electric Testing Lab still accepts orders for the ETL Mark V.[ citation needed ] Using this as a base, researchers at the University of Kyoto cooperated to improve the technology which resulted in the HITAC 102 (also referred to as the Kyoto-Daigaku Digital Computer 1). Researchers at Japan's Economic Planning Agency introduced an improved version (HITAC 102B) as a substitute to the punch card system. In 1961, the HITAC 201 was developed as a smaller computer for business use.
Moreover, in 1958, The Railway Technical Research Institute of Japan dispatched MARS. Although the first version of MARS did not include the HITAC system, its successor MARS101 utilized the HITAC 3030. After that point, Hitachi consistently used it as its mainframe.
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The IBM 7030, also known as Stretch, was IBM's first transistorized supercomputer. It was the fastest computer in the world from 1961 until the first CDC 6600 became operational in 1964.
The Cyclone, was 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 prototype was 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 IBM 700/7000 series is a series of large-scale (mainframe) computer systems that were made by IBM through the 1950s and early 1960s. The series includes several different, incompatible processor architectures. The 700s use vacuum-tube logic and were made obsolete by the introduction of the transistorized 7000s. The 7000s, in turn, were eventually replaced with System/360, which was announced in 1964. However the 360/65, the first 360 powerful enough to replace 7000s, did not become available until November 1965. Early problems with OS/360 and the high cost of converting software kept many 7000s in service for years afterward.
The IBM 305 RAMAC was the first commercial computer that used a moving-head hard disk drive for secondary storage. The system was publicly announced on September 14, 1956, with test units already installed at the U.S. Navy and at private corporations. RAMAC stood for "Random Access Method of Accounting and Control", as its design was motivated by the need for real-time accounting in business.
The Mercury was an early commercial computer from the mid-1950s built by Ferranti. It was the successor to the Ferranti Mark 1, adding a floating point unit for improved performance, and increased reliability by replacing the Williams tube memory with core memory and using more solid-state components. The computer had roughly 2000 vacuum tubes and 2000 germanium diodes. Nineteen Mercuries were sold before Ferranti moved on to newer designs.
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 in 1957, and fully developed form in 1960. Although the performance was quite good, equal to that of contemporary machines like the PDP-1, no commercial vendors ever took up the design, and the only potential sale to the Canadian Navy's Pacific Naval Laboratories, fell through. The machine is currently part of the Canadian national science and technology collection housed at the Canada Science and Technology Museum.
The FP-6000 was a second-generation mainframe computer developed and built by Ferranti-Packard, the Canadian division of Ferranti, in the early 1960s. It is particularly notable for supporting multitasking, being one of the first commercial machines to do so. Only six FP-6000s were sold before the computer division of Ferranti-Packard was sold off by Ferranti's UK headquarters in 1963, the FP-6000 becoming the basis for the mid-range machines of the ICT 1900, which sold into the thousands in Europe.
IBM 7070 is 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 company's first transistorized stored-program computer.
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.
The Orion was a mid-range mainframe computer introduced by Ferranti in 1959 and installed for the first time in 1961. Ferranti positioned Orion to be their primary offering during the early 1960s, complementing their high-end Atlas and smaller systems like the Sirius and Argus. The Orion was based on a new type of logic circuit known as "Neuron" and included built-in multitasking support, one of the earliest commercial machines to do so.
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.
This timeline of binary prefixes lists events in the history of the evolution, development, and use of units of measure which are germane to the definition of the binary prefixes by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in 1998, used primarily with units of information such as the bit and the byte.
Ferranti's Sirius was a small computer released in 1961. Designed to be used in smaller offices without a dedicated programming staff, the Sirius used decimal arithmetic instead of binary, supported Autocode to ease programming, was designed to fit behind a standard office desk, and ran on UK standard mains electricity with no need for cooling. It was also fairly slow, with instruction speeds around 4,000 operations per second, and had limited main memory based on delay lines, but as Ferranti pointed out, its price/performance ratio was difficult to beat.
The Datamatic Division of Honeywell announced the H-800 electronic computer in 1958. The first installation occurred in 1960. A total of 89 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.
The Monroe Calculating Machine Mark XI was a general-purpose stored-program electronic digital computer introduced in 1960 by the Monroe Calculating Machine Division of Litton Industries. The system was marketed for "primarily for billing, and invoice writing", but could also be used for low-end scientific computing.
The RCA 501 was a transistor computer manufactured by RCA beginning in 1958.
Philco was one of the pioneers of transistorized 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 Zuse Z23 was a transistorized computer first delivered in 1961, designed by the Zuse KG company. A total of 98 units were sold to commercial and academic customers up until 1967. It had a 40-bit word length and used an 8192 word drum memory as main storage, with 256 words of rapid-access ferrite memory. It operated on fixed and floating-point binary numbers. Fixed-point addition took 0.3 milliseconds, a fixed point multiplication took 10.3 milliseconds. It was similar in internal design to the earlier vacuum tube Z22. Related variants were the Z25 and Z26 models.
