ITWAS TO HAVE BEENTHE NUCLEAR AGE. 7 1 1 THE EVOLUTION OF IBM COMPUTERS Wheels- and------ levers-- - -- - The beginning of data processing 'This apparatus works un- erringly as the mills of the gods, but beats them hollow as to speed. ' -Electrical Engineer November 11,1891 In the 1880s, the U.S. Census Bureau faced a crisis. It was clear that by the time it could count the 1890 census the An original Holler- ith keypunch. This data would be obsolete. So mechanical device, the Bureau held a contest to The IBM 080 card along with a tabu- see if it could find a faster sorter was a fa- lator and card miliar object to four sorter, enabled the way to tabulate the results. decades of office + US.Government to Dr. Herman Hollerith, a young workers. It was still The Hollerith count the 1890 being manufac- tabulator relied on census twice as engineer in the Census Bu- tured in the 1950s. electromagnet- fast as the 1880 reau, won hands down. He in- ically operated census even vented an electromechani- counters. From that though the popula- central invention tion had grown by cal machine activated by emerged progres- 25 percent. The punched cards. The holes in In 1941, this IBM sively faster tabu- Hollerith concept, 040 unit converted lating and com- while improved the cards represented vital telegraph paper panion machines. upon through the statistics. Hollerith said the tape directly into Introduced in 1925, years, remained punched cards. the IBM 080 card the basis of the idea occurred to him when It was the first ma- sorter processed information proc- he saw a railroad conductor chine to do so. 400 punched cards essing industry With the 040, the per minute. The through World use a ticket punch. In 1896, U.S. Air Corps ob- IBM 031 keypunch, War II. Hollerith founded the Tabu- tained summary introduced in 1933, lating Machine Company, totalsin inventory of equipment at its was one of the first machines one of three firms which later depots daily in- to permit punch- became International Busi- stead of annually. ing of letters as well as numbers ness Machines Corporation. into cards. The IBM 405 tabulator, . In 1944, Haward's introduced in 1934, Dr. Howard Aiken could add or sub- and IBM completed tract 150 punched five years of work cards per minute. -.---- on the Mark I, the largest electro- mechanical calcu- lator ever built. It had 3,300 relays and weighed 5 tons. It could mul- With electronics, thousands of times faster Electromechanical machines were too pedestrian for the swift-paced postwar world. Users wanted speed, and the vacuum tube responded to their demand. Vacuum tubes, flipped on and off like switches, could count thou- sands of times faster than moving mechanical parts. But the story doesn't lie in vac- uum tubes alone. It lies in the creation of computer sys- tems that incorporated not only vacuum tubes, but also other advancing technol- ogies. Between 1946 and 1952, a series of electronic calculators and computers emerged in rapid succession: ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania, the IBM Selec- tive Sequence Electronic Cal- culator, The Institute for Ad- vanced Study computer, UNI- VAC for the Census Bureau, and the IBM 701-to name a few. In 1946, IBM vacuum tube machines could multiply two 10-digit numbers in 1/40 of a second; by 1953, in 1/2000 of a second. The IBM 604 was the first electronic calculator to supplant electromechanical office equipment on any scale. It was also the first electronic machine that could be easily repaired. Without tools, service engineers could remove one tube and its associated parts (shown at top) and plug in another. The array of tubes (below) were used in a later computer. C The IEM 701 could add a typewritten column of 10-digit numbers as tall as the Statue of Lib- erty in about one second. In one hour it could Solve a problem in air- craft wing design The 13M Selective that might have Sequence El=- tahan engineer .tronic Calculator, seven years with a ~ompletedin 1947, desk calculator. contained both Announced in vacuum tubes and 1952, the 701 was relays. It was mare a portent of the than 100 times larger, faster faster than the machines yet to Mark I. It was the come. first IBM stored program machine, and it could select its own calcylating sequence by m&i- fying its own stored instructions-thus, its name, The vacuum tape column, invented by IBM in 1950, controlled the reel- ing and unreeling of tape and kept it from snapping. Vacuum columns are at left and right, under reels. + 1BM's Naval Ord- nance Research Calculator was the most powerful computer of its day back in 1954. It had 9,000 vacuum tubes. When IBM intro- duced its 305 RAMAC (for ran- dom access) in Better ways to find 1956, data proc- information fast essing leapfrogged into the future. Magnetically The vacuum tube vastly in- coated aluminum creased the computer's cal- disks (such as miniature replica culating speed. But it did little at left) stored to improve the efficiency of volumes of data on concentric tracks. two other critical aspects of In afraction of a the computer's configuration: second, a read/ storage and memory. The write mechanism found the right early vacuum tube computers magnetic spot and stored data on punched cards retrieved data from any point on the or tape and drums and relied disk. The RAMAC's on cathode ray tubes or 50 spinning disks contained five mil- drums for active memory. lion characters of Punched cards were slow and information. not rewritable. Tape could be inefficient because of the time taken in reeling and unreeling. Cathode ray tubes were ex- pensive and unreliable. The urgent demand for faster and cheaper storage and memory devices stimulated research and development in magnet- 1' ics -magnetic disks and Current-carrying drums for storage, magnetic wires that pass through iron oxide cores for memory, and better cores magnetize materials for better magnetic them clockwise or counterclockwise. tapes. Cores switched from one magnetic +Vacuum tubes and state to the other core memories in millionths of a were combined second. One mag- in the mammoth netic direction computer, SAGE, represents a zero, built by IBM under the other, a one the direction of in the computer's M.I.T. SAGE was binary code. In- The IBM 650 was used as part of the ventors outside a widely used U. S, air defense. IBM originally de- general-purpose The 1134017 com- veloped the donut- computer for busi- puter, containing shaped cores for ness, industry, 58,000 tubes, memory, and IBM and universities. processed data perfected the When introduced, transmitted from a method for making it processed data radar network in them. The com- on punched cards. real-time. That is, pany adapted pill- Later users could the data was proc- making machinery add magnetic tapes essed as rapidly to produce them by and disks. The 650 as it was received. the millions. had a magnetic drum memory. Transistors Smaller, faster, more reliable The transistor was invented at Bell Laboratories in 1947. But it's often a long road from invention to application. IBM and the semiconductor indus- try invested nearly a decade in research to perfect a mass production and testing proc- ess and to incorporate the solid-state technology- which the transistor repre- sented-into the computer. The transistor was only 1/200 the size of the bulky vacuum tube. It was smaller, faster, and could be pack- aged tightly-an electrical im- pulse had less distance to travel. And because it was composed of a solid sub- stance, it was far more rugged and reliable. In operation, it generated much less heat than a vacuum tube. In the late 1950s, more sophisti- cated computers arrived- ones that employed transis- tors for arithmetic, ferrite cores for memory, and mag- netic disks or tapes for stor- age. Now the computer could multiply two 10-digit numbers in 1/100,000 of a second. IBM built the in- tolerances as Transistors and dustry's first fully close as 112000 printed circuits automatic tran- of an inch, the were combined sistor production line produced and on cards like this. line at its Pough- tested 1,800 tran- The cards were keepsie plant in sistors per hour. plugged into large 1959. Holding to frames, or gates, -b which swung out STRETCH,built by for maintenance. IBM in 1960, waa the mast powerful computer of its day. Its 150,000 transistors could instruction at a time and prepare itself for future Introduced in sized uaw$-rmk- 1959, IBM de- in0 it by far the livefed more than most popular 10,000 of these computer up to transistorked that time. IBM 140t corn- puters, many to small and medium- The disk pgck. the same time, one IBM introduced IBM tape reel storage units with could store 17 such removabk million characters disks in 1982. of infarmation. A !3ah dl& pack tape unit could contslined well over rwd and store the 2 million charac- equivalent of 1,I00 ters, and the user punched cards per could switch pecks second. with ease. At about J9s computing In 1883, the "train" sp-de inar-ed printer boosted so did pprinting printing speeds to spesds. The 1,100 lines per '%hain" primter minute. Rather then produced600 lines riding on a chain, per minute In typefaces now 1939,a tourtold rode on a steel increase over track. the earlier most widely used IBM printing method.