Avidac early 1950s at the Institute for Advanced Study . It was built in the Physical Department of the Laboratory, cost $ 250,000 and was launched on January 28, 1953 [1] . Like all other computers of that time, AVIDAC was built in a single copy and could not exchange programs with other computers, even those that were built on the model of the same IAS machine .
The decision to build a computer on the model of the IAS-machine was made in the Laboratory in 1949. On the advice of Herman Goldstein, the AVIDAC project was led by Jeffrey Chuan Chu , with whom Goldstein was familiar with working on ENIAC and EDVAC computers. The construction of the computer began in 1950 and was completed in 1951, so it went into operation earlier than its ancestor, the IAS machine [2] .
The computer was "compact" by the standards of the time, it occupied an entire room. It used 2,500 vacuum tubes, 8,000 resistors, and about 3.5 miles of wires. The memory module could store 1,024 decimal 20-bit numbers in 40 5-inch Williams tubes.
The team of engineers who built AVIDAC, a year later, helped build a similar ORACLE computer for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory , and in 1957 another computer, GEORGE for the Argonne National Laboratory [3] .
Literature
- Herman H. Goldstine. The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann . - Princeton University Press, 1980 .-- 365 p. - ISBN 9780691023670 . (eng.)
- William Aspray. John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing . - MIT Press, 1990 .-- 394 p. - ISBN 0262011212 . (eng.)
- Jack M. Holl. Argonne National Laboratory, 1946-96 . - University of Illinois, 1997 .-- 644 p. - ISBN 0252023412 . (eng.)
Notes
- ↑ Holl, 1997 , p. 123.
- ↑ Aspray, 1990 , p. 92.
- ↑ Goldstine, 1980 , p. 307.