Computers In 1940-1960 Photos | First Old Computers

Z4 (computer) - 1944

The Z4 computer was the world's second commercial digital computer, designed by German engineer Konrad Zuse and built by his company Zuse Apparatebau in 1944.

Colossus Mark 1 - 1944

The Colossus machines were electronic computing devices used by British codebreakers to read encrypted German messages during World War II. These were the world's first programmable, digital, electronic, computing devices. They used vacuum tubes (thermionic valves) to perform the calculations.

ENIAC - 1946

ENIAC, short for Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer, was the first general-purpose electronic computer. It was a Turing-complete, digital computer capable of being reprogrammed to solve a full range of computing problems. ENIAC was designed to calculate artillery firing tables for the U.S. Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory, but its first use was in calculations for the hydrogen bomb.

Whirlwind - 1951

Development of the Whirlwind computer began in 1945, and the system was first demonstrated on April 20th, 1951. This was the first digital computer capable of displaying real time text and graphics on a video terminal, which at this time was a large oscilloscope screen. The Whirlwind was also the first computer to use Core Memory for RAM, a storage method that flourished until the 1970's. Core memory permanently stores binary data on tiny donut shaped magnets strung together by a wire grid.

UNIVAC I - 1951

The UNIVAC I (UNIVersal Automatic Computer I) was the first commercial computer produced in the United States. It was designed principally by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, the inventors of the ENIAC. Design work was begun by their company, Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, 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".)

WITCH - 1951

The Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computing from Harwell (WITCH), originally known as The Harwell Computer[1] and later as The Harwell Dekatron Computer[2][3], was an early British relay-based computer.

BESK - 1953

BESK (Binary Electronic Sequence Calculator) was Sweden's first electronic computer, using vacuum tubes instead of relays. It was developed by Matematikmaskinnämnden (Swedish Board for Computing Machinery) and during a short time it was the fastest computer in the world. The computer was completed in 1953 and in use until 1966. The technology behind BESK was later continued with FACIT EDB. A copy of BESK called SMIL was made for the University of Lund, and a copy of BESK made in Denmark was called DASK.

IBM 702 - 1955

The IBM 702 (photos) was announced September 25, 1953 and withdrawn October 1, 1954, but the first production model was not installed until July 1955. The successor to the 702 in the 700/7000 series was the IBM 705.

The system used electrostatic storage, consisting of 14, 28, 42, 56, or 70 Williams tubes with a capacity of 1000 bits each for the main memory, giving a memory of 2,000 to 10,000 characters of 7 bits each (in increments of 2,000 characters), and 14 Williams tubes with a capacity of 512 bits each for the two 512 character accumulators.

IBM NORC - 1954

The IBM Naval Ordnance Research Calculator (NORC) was a one-of-a-kind first-generation (vacuum tube) electronic computer built by IBM for the United States Navy's Bureau of Ordnance. It went into service in December 1954 and was likely the most powerful computer at the time. The NORC was the first supercomputer.

IBM 305 RAMAC - 1956

The IBM 305 RAMAC, publicly announced on September 13, 1956, was the first commercial computer that used a moving head hard disk drive (magnetic disk storage) for secondary storage. RAMAC stood for "Random Access Method of Accounting and Control". Its design was motivated by the need for real time accounting in business.

During the 1960 Olympic Winter Games in Squaw Valley (USA), IBM provided the first electronic data processing systems for the Games. The system featured an IBM RAMAC 305 computer, punch card data collection, and a central printing facility.

Bendix G-15 - 1956

The Bendix G-15 computer was introduced in 1956 by the Bendix Corporation, Computer Division, Los Angeles, California. It was about 5 by 3 by 3 ft (1.5m by 1m by 1m) and weighed about 950 lb (450 kg). The base system, without peripherals, cost $49,500. A working model cost around $60,000. It could also be rented for $1,485 per month. It was meant for scientific and industrial markets. The series was gradually discontinued when Control Data Corporation took over the Bendix computer division in 1963.

Pegasus - 1956

Pegasus was an early thermionic valve (vacuum tube) computer built by Ferranti, Ltd of Great Britain.

The Pegasus 1 was first delivered in 1956 and the Pegasus 2 was delivered in 1959. Ferranti sold twenty-six copies of the Pegasus 1 and twelve copies of the Pegasus 2, making it Ferranti's most popular valve (vacuum tube) computer.

AN/FSQ-7 - 1958

The AN/FSQ-7 was a computer model developed and built in the 1950s by IBM in partnership with the US Air Force. Fifty-two were built and used for command and control functions for the SAGE air-defense system.

An AN/FSQ-7 computer contained 55,000 vacuum tubes, occupied about half an acre (2,000 m²) of floor space, weighed 275 tons, and used up to three megawatts of power. Performance was about 75,000 instructions per second. The fifty-two AN/FSQ-7s remain the largest computers ever built, and will likely hold that record in the future.

IBM 7090 - 1959

The IBM 7090 was a second-generation transistorized version of the earlier IBM 709 vacuum tube mainframe computers and was designed for "large-scale scientific and technological applications". The 7090 was the third member of the IBM 700/7000 series scientific computers. The first 7090 installation was in November 1959. In 1960, a typical system sold for $2,900,000 or could be rented for $63,500 a month.

The 7090 used a 36-bit word length, with an address-space of 32K (32,768) words. It operated with a basic memory cycle of 2.18 μs, using the IBM 7302 Core Storage core memory technology from the IBM 7030 (Stretch) project.

Datasaab D2 - 1960

D2 was a concept and prototype computer designed by Datasaab in Linköping, Sweden. It was built with discrete transistors and completed in 1960. Its purpose was to investigate the feasibility of building a computer for use in an aircraft to assist with navigation, ultimately leading to the design of the CK37 computer used in Saab 37 Viggen. This military side of the project was known as SANK, or Saabs Automatiska Navigations-Kalkylator (Saab's Automatic Navigational-Calculator), and D2 was the name for its civilian application.

BRLESC - 1962

The BRLESC I (Ballistic Research Laboratories Electronic Scientific Computer) was a first-generation electronic computer built by the United States Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory.

BRLESC was designed primarily for scientific and military tasks requiring high precision and high computational speed, such as ballistics problems, army logistical problems, and weapons systems evaluations. It contained 1727 vacuum tubes and 853 transistors and had a memory of 4096 72-bit words. BRLESC employed punch cards, magnetic tape, and a magnetic drum as input-output devices, which could be operated simultaneously.

Honeywell 200 - 1963

The Honeywell 200 was a character-oriented two-address commercial computer introduced by Honeywell in the early 1960s, the basis of later models including 1200, 1250, 2200, 3200, 4200 and the later 2070, and the character processor of the Honeywell 8200.

Introduced to compete with IBM's 1401, the H200 was two or three times faster and, with software support, could execute IBM 1401 programs without need for their recompilation or reassembly. The Liberator marketing campaign exploited this compatibility, and was credited in later Honeywell publicity statements with stalling the sales of IBM 1401 machines. Honeywell claimed an initial rush of hundreds of orders for the H200 that itself stalled when IBM countered with a marketing emphasis on their System 360 product range that was then under development.

UNIVAC 1108 - 1964

The UNIVAC 1108 was the second member of Sperry Rand's UNIVAC 1100 series of computers, introduced in 1964. Integrated circuits replaced the thin film memory that the UNIVAC 1107 used for register storage. Smaller and faster cores, compared to the 1107, were used for main memory.