It weighed 30 short tons (27 t), was roughly 8.5 feet by 3 feet by 80 feet (2.6 m by 0.9 m by 26 m), took up 680 square feet (63 m²), and consumed 150 kW of power. Besides its speed, the most remarkable thing about ENIAC was its size. ENIAC contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and around 5 million hand-soldered joints. Input was possible from an IBM card reader, while an IBM card punch was used for output. These cards could be used to produce printed output offline using an IBM accounting machine, probably the IBM 405. ENIAC used ten-position ring counters to store digits; each digit used 36 tubes, 10 of which were the dual triodes making up the flip-flops of the ring counter. Arithmetic was performed by “counting” pulses with the ring counters and generating carry pulses if the counter “wrapped around”, the idea being to emulate in electronics the operation of the digit wheels of a mechanical adding machine. ENIAC had twenty ten-digit signed accumulators that used ten’s complement representation and could perform 5,000 simple addition or subtraction operations between any of them and a source.
ENIAC used common octal-base radio tubes of the day; the decimal accumulators were made of 6SN7 flip-flops, while 6L7s, 6SJ7s, 6SA7s and 6AC7s were used in logic functions. Numerous 6L6s and 6V6s served as line drivers to drive pulses through cables between rack assemblies.
The integrated circuit was independently co-invented by Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments[2] and Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor [3] around the same time. Kilby recorded his initial ideas concerning the integrated circuit in July 1958 and successfully demonstrated the first working integrated circuit on September 12, 1958.[2] Kilby won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics for his part of the invention of the integrated circuit.[4] Robert Noyce also came up with his own idea of integrated circuit, half a year later than Kilby. Noyce’s chip had solved many practical problems that the microchip developed by Kilby had not. Noyce’s chip, made at Fairchild, was made of silicon, whereas Kilby’s chip was made of germanium.The Timex Sinclair 1000 is the North American version of the Sinclair ZX-81, from British based Sinclair Research Ltd. They are nearly identical, except for the name on the front, and minor motherboard layout differences.The first Sinclair computer was the
ZX-80, released in 1980 for $200.00.
It was still very popular when they came out with the improved ZX-81 in 1981.
By mid 1982, Timex was selling the ZX-81, renaming it as the ‘Timex Sinclair 1000′. The system shown above has the optional 16K memory expansion unit attached to the back… it’s a calculator.
As is true of many facets in computing, the phrase “Personal Computer” can be something of a slippery customer. For example, the IBM 610 Auto-Point Computer (1957) was described as being “IBM’s first personal computer” on the premise that it was intended for use by a single operator, but this machine was not based on the stored program concept and it cost $55,000! Other contenders include MIT’s LINC (1963), CTC’s Datapoint 2200 (1971), the Kenbak-1 (1971), and the Xerox Alto (1973), but all of these machines were either cripplingly expensive, relatively unusable, or only intended as experimental projects. So, for our purposes here, we will understand “Personal Computer” to refer to an affordable, general-purpose, microprocessor- based computer intended for the consumer market
After biting a lion living near a radiation power plant the fly began to form the features of a lion.
( LOL )-(good movie though)-
