IBM 704 vacuum tube module (with Mechanical Relay)
physical object
Identifier
2010.1.13Description
This is a vacuum tube module for the IBM 704 system. You can see of a row of 6 vacuum tubes with a mechanical relay in between them. In later iterations the relay was replaced by two more vacuum tubes for a total of eight. The tubes were part of the logic circuitry. IBM sold the 704 computer from 1954 to 1960. It was a 'scientific' computer, intended for complex calculations, and one of the earliest to use core memory. The FORTRAN and LISP programming languages were originally developed for the IBM 704. In Canada, Avro Aircraft Limited used an IBM 704. Perhaps this tube came from Avro, and played a part in the development of the famous Avro Arrow with Lee Jennings. The birth of IBM vacuum tube was from an IBMer, A. Halsey Dickinson. He used tubes to build a computer that could perform arithmetic as fast as possible. With a circuit called 'flip-flop', the machine could switch on and off quickly. The early version of these vacuum tubes are used in atomic research in the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC). ENIAC used approximately 17,480 vacuum tubes to perform the calculations.Related Term
vacuum tubes (describes)External links
Lee Jennings – Amateur Radio ZL2ALRelated people
Systems Design Undergraduate Lab (was donor of)Kina Kim (is documentarian of)
Evan Wolfe (is documentarian of)
Scott Campbell (is documentarian of)
Ayoung Eun (is documentarian of)