7 Dec
2007
7 Dec
'07
11:03 p.m.
Evan wrote:
A few days ago, someone asked about TRADIC. Tonight I stumbled upon a mention of this
computer on page 204 of the book "Crystal Fire" (Michael Riordan and Lillian
Hoddeson, 1997). The authors wrote, "In January 1954 Whippany engineers built a fully
transistorized computer for the Air Force. Called TRADIC (for TRAnsistorized DIgital
Computer), it used 700 point-contact transistors and more than 10,000 germanium crystal
rectifiers in its circuits. Capable of performing a million logical operations every
second, TRADIC was the first completely solid-state computer; it approached the speed of
computers based on vacuum tubes."
By "Whippany" they meant the Whippany, N.J. location of Bell Labs.
TRADIC is a well-known machine in the history of computing.
A little googling does bring up a lot of refs.
(I think there's another experimental/proof-of-concept machine commonly
mentioned as being one of the first transistorised machines (something from
Philco perhaps?).)
Another anecdote I ran across a few years ago in the IEEE AotHoC (which I wish
had kept a ref to), was of an IBM engineer working on one of the first
transistorised designs in the mid-50s (ECL IIRC), telling the story of how he
chose 5 Volts for the logic supply.