25 Jan
2017
25 Jan
'17
10:55 a.m.
On 01/25/2017 09:39 AM, Jon Elson wrote:
Well, of course. If you look at the design of some of
the last gasps
of the tube generation like the Bendix G15, you will see what
incredible hoops they had to jump through to make a viable product.
Or, look at SAGE, which filled an enormous building with walls of
tube-encrusted cabinets. Transistors and core memory really changed
the landscape completely. On the other hand, computers like the LINC
were quite useful with a really modest number of transistors,
certainly no more than 1000 or so, while the 7070 used 30,000!
Try, say, the PB-250, with 400 transistors; a 22 bit machine. There was
a healthy mistrust of early transistors. Witness the one-transistor
DTMF encoder used on early Touch-Tone phones or the very low transistor
count in the early Dataphones.
Nowadays, of course, we think of a million transistors as being modest.
--Chuck