The vacuum tube technology of the first generation was not very dependable. In
fact, some ENIAC detractors believed that the system would never run because
the tubes would burn out faster than they could be replaced. Although system reliability
wasn’t as bad as the doomsayers predicted, vacuum tube systems often
experienced more downtime than uptime.
In 1948, three researchers with Bell Laboratories—John Bardeen, Walter Brattain,
and William Shockley—invented the transistor. This new technology not only
revolutionized devices such as televisions and radios, but also pushed the computer
industry into a new generation. Because transistors consume less power than vacuum
tubes, are smaller, and work more reliably, the circuitry in computers consequently
became smaller and more reliable. Despite using transistors, computers of this generation
were still bulky and quite costly. Typically only universities, governments, and
large businesses could justify the expense. Nevertheless, a plethora of computer
makers emerged in this generation; IBM, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC),
and Univac (now Unisys) dominated the industry. IBM marketed the 7094 for scientific
applications and the 1401 for business applications. DEC was busy manufacturing
the PDP-1. A company founded (but soon sold) by Mauchly and Eckert built the
Univac systems. The most successful Unisys systems of this generation belonged to
its 1100 series. Another company, Control Data Corporation (CDC), under the supervision
of Seymour Cray, built the CDC 6600, the world’s first supercomputer. The
$10 million CDC 6600 could perform 10 million instructions per second, used 60-bit
words, and had an astounding 128 kilowords of main memory.
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