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
