IBM 7074 and then some: "Systems we love" conference

[Chuck Guzis]

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