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Williams tube
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Components
The Williams tube won the race for a practical random-access memory. Sir
Frederick Williams of Manchester University modified a cathode-ray tube to
paint dots and dashes of phosphorescent electrical charge on the screen,
representing binary ones and zeros. Vacuum tube machines, such as the IBM
701, used the Williams tube as primary memory.
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Point-contact transistor
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Components
On December 23, William Shockley, Walter Brattain, and John Bardeen
successfully tested this point-contact transistor, setting off the
semiconductor revolution. Improved models of the transistor, developed at
AT&T Bell Laboratories, supplanted vacuum tubes used on computers at the
time.
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Eckert and Mauchly with the ENIAC
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Companies
Computer pioneers Presper Eckert and John Mauchly founded the Eckert-Mauchly
Computer Corp. to construct machines based on their experience with ENIAC and
EDVAC. The only machine the company built was BINAC. Before completing the
UNIVAC, the company became a division of Remington Rand.
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