Name/Title
1948- IBM 604- Pluggable Vacuum Tube, (7 ea) (3/2024)Tags
IBMDescription
1948 IBM 604- Each plug-in assembly fits in the footprint of a single miniature tube, both the tube itself and the additional components and wiring required to produce a specific logic element. The calculator had some 2,000 vacuum tubes, but only 15 or so different pluggable unit types were needed. In 1948 IBM introduced a small electronic calculator, the IBM 604 Electronic Calculating Punch. Opinions may differ as to its smallness: one paper from 1951 describes it as “a miniature card-programmed electronic calculator”; from the image at right, you can form your own idea of how miniature it really was. Still, the 604 came only 2 years after the room-sized ENIAC, the first large electronic computer; and unlike that one-off monster machine it was meant for business use and was accordingly mass-produced. And this introduced a problem, for these early machines used thousands of discrete vacuum tubes, and many more resistors, capacitors and the like, which had to be wired together by hand and which presented a maintenance nightmare afterwards. The 604 was the first machine to attempt an elegant solution to this problem, by introducing Pluggable Units.
