MUSASINO-1 (or other spelling MUSASHINO-1 [1] ) is one of the first electronic digital computers built in Japan in the city of Musashino (now the Tokyo area). Computer creation began in 1952 at the Nippon Telegram and Telephone Public Corporation (NTT) Electrical Communications Laboratory and was completed in March 1957 [2] . The computer was used until July 1962. It is the second Japanese digital electronic computer with a program stored in memory after FUJIC (March 1956) [3] .
Content
Creation History
The computer was created under the guidance of engineer Muroga Saburo [4] upon his return to Japan from the USA, where in the summer of 1954 he participated in the creation of the ILLIAC I computer at the University of Illinois . Through ILLIAC I, there is a “kinship” between MUSASINO-1 and the von Neumann IAS machine .
MUSASINO-1 was used at NTT Lab for various calculations. Since it was assembled by hand and was essentially a prototype, its work was unstable and required high maintenance costs. The commercial version of the computer called MUSASINO-1B was introduced only in 1960. Later, this machine was sold on the market by Fuji Telecommunications Manufacturing (now Fujitsu) under the name FACOM 201. It was intended for scientific calculations and served as the basis for a number of early Fujtisu FACOM computers built using parametrons as an element base [5] .
Description
- Bit depth: binary
- Command format: unicast
- Real Number Representation: Fixed-Point
- Data entry: a punched tape was read by a photoelectric input device
- Data Output: Punched Tape
- Clock frequency: 6-25 kHz [6]
The computer used 519 vacuum tubes and 5400 parametrons . [2] The size of memory on magnetic cores was at first 32 words, and a year later - 256 words. The word consisted of 40 bits. Each word contained two instructions. Addition was carried out in 1350 microseconds, multiplication in 6800 microseconds, and division in 26.1 milliseconds.
The MUSASINO-1 instruction set was a superset of the ILLIAC I computer instructions, so that it was possible to run programs written for ILLIAC I, but not all: many programs for ILLIAC I used some bits in the instructions for storing data, and the MUSASINO-1 computer recognized these bits as commands.
See also
- Fujic
- ILLIAC I
Literature
- Raúl Rojas, Ulf Hashagen. The First Computers: History and Architectures . - MIT Press, 2002 .-- 471 p. - ISBN 9780262681377 . (eng.)
- In memory of Saburo Muroga, CS @ Illinois Alumni Magazine, Summer 2011
Notes
- ↑ Martin Fransman: The Market and Beyond: Cooperation and Competition in Information Technology
- ↑ 1 2 Descriptions of MUSASINO-1 and its immediate descendants on the site of the Computer Museum of the Japanese Information Processing Society
- ↑ Rojas, 2002 , p. 323.
- ↑ Biography of Muroga Saburo
- ↑ Fujitsu FACOM 200, 201, 202, 212 Parametron Computers
- ↑ Rojas, 2002 , p. 327.