Name/Title
1955/06, Popular Electronics, "TRADIC- The Super Computer"Tags
Popular ElectronicsDescription
A miniature electronic "brain" that can operate flawlessly in planes flying at supersonic speed has been developed for the U. S. Air Force by Bell Telephone Laboratories.
The "brain" is a digital computer which eliminates vacuum tube failure and heat, jet aircraft's greatest electronic problems, by the use of transistors instead of vacuum tubes. It contains nearly 800 of these tiny, solid devices and is believed to be the first all-transistor computer designed for aircraft. Transistors, developed at Bell Laboratories, are completely cold, highly efficient amplifying devices which use very little power.
Known as "TRADIC" (TRansistor-DIgital-Computer) , the new computer requires less than 100 watts to operate. This is one twentieth of the power needed by comparable vacuum-tube computers. Early computers used as many as 18,000 vacuum tubes and frequently required thousands of watts to operate.
The new electronic "brain" contains, in addition to transistors, nearly 11,000 germanium diodes. These serve as the electronic equivalent of tiny one-way switches. Solid, like transistors, they are capable of operating thousands of times faster than their mechanical counterparts.
When design work has been completed, the computer will probably occupy less than three cubic feet of the critical space in modern military aircraft.
TRADIC can do sixty thousand additions or subtractions, or three thousand multiplications or divisions a second. A typical problem fed into the machine requires it to go through about 250 different steps of computation. It can run through an entire problem of that complexity and provide an answer in about 15 thousandths of a second-^much less time than it takes to say "TRADIC." The computer can handle, simultaneously, as many as thirteen 16digit numbers.
