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ILLIAC IV
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Computers
The Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency contracted with the
University of Illinois to build a large parallel processing computer, the
ILLIAC IV, which did not operate until 1972 at NASA's Ames Research Center.
The first large-scale array computer, the ILLIAC IV achieved a computation
speed of 200 million instructions per second, about 300 million operations per
second, and 1 billion bits per second of I/O transfer via a unique combination
of parallel architecture and the overlapping or "pipe-lining"
structure of its 64 processing elements.
This photograph shows one of the ILLIAC's 13 Burroughs disks, the debugging
computer, the central unit, and the processing unit cabinet with a processing
element.
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Acoustically coupled modem
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Networks
John van Geen of the Stanford Research Institute vastly improved the
acoustically coupled modem. His receiver reliably detected bits of data
despite background noise heard over long-distance phone lines. Inventors
developed the acoustically coupled modem to connect computers to the telephone
network by means of the standard telephone handset of the day.
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HP-2115
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Computers
Hewlett-Packard entered the general purpose computer business with its HP-2115
for computation, offering a computational power formerly found only in much
larger computers. It supported a wide variety of languages, among them BASIC,
ALGOL, and FORTRAN.
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