Second Generation Computers

In 1947, Bell Laboratories invented the transistor.¹¹ This creation sparked the production of a wave of "second generation" computers. Texas Instruments improved the transistor in 1954 by using silicon rather than germanium. Using silicon was an improvement because it could withstand higher temperatures than the germanium. The area of California where Texas Instruments was located has since become known as Silicon Valley because many computer manufacturing companies have been built in this area.¹² By using transistors in place of vacuum tubes, manufacturers could produce more reliable computers. Using transistors was also less expensive than building a computer with vacuum tubes. The combination of smaller size, better reliability, and lower cost made these second generation computers very popular with buyers. In 1956, using transistors, researchers at Bell Laboratories in New York built a computer called the Leprechaun. IBM, Philco, GE, and RCA quickly followed suit by producing their own transis

Americans did not use these new smaller computers solely for calculations. People soon found that computers were very good at data processing. By feeding the computer input via punch cards, the computer could easily sort the data and then print out the sorted material. Computer companies started to produce two different types of computers. For scientists and engineers, they built large powerful computers which were good at performing calculations.

Mom: In the mid-1960s, I worked for a company called Thomas & Betts as my summer job. I was in college at the time and Thomas & Betts was a company that made electrical fittings. I was working in the computer department there. The computer was new to the company, it was new in companies at the time and they were just learning how to make use of this tool. The computers that they had were very, very large. They had to be in air-conditioned rooms and people had to make sure that no dirt was taken into the room, because all of the information that was in the computer was put on magnetic tape. They had very very large reels of the magnetic tape and it was all stored in this large room, where they could take the reels and get their information from it in the future if necessary.

For banks and insurance companies, computer manufacturers produced smaller, fast computers which were good at sorting and printing. IBM marketed its 7094 for calculations and its 1401 for data processing.¹⁴

Mom: There were also some smaller computers in the accounting department. I remember when we first put the payroll on computer that we would have to punch all the information that we wanted onto what were called key punch cards which were cardboard cards which were maybe three inches by six inches. Anything that you wanted to go into the computer would first have to go onto these key punch cards. So, there were people who sat as key punch operators all day who punched information onto these cards which would then be stacked up and put on the computer. Then, someone would have to program the computer to take this information and organize it into a usable form.

Uncle Murph: The next machine was actually a solid state machine, the 705, and it employed magnetic tape. That was, as I said earlier, that was a relief to me. When they say "What was your impression of the first computer?" I say "Relief!" because instead of handling 19 million cards, Hollerith IBM cards, with the punched holes in them, the stuff you saved the confetti for the football games, instead of handling all those cards, we didn't have to handle them anymore. We could just read them and write them to tape. Once we had them on tape and we had the right software, we could sort the tape.

Mom: To program the computer, you would have a circuit board. The circuit board would have wires on it and you would physically have to move the wires on the circuit board to different positions. Suppose you had a payroll to go out, then the circuit board would have a certain position. If you were doing inventory, the circuit board would have a different position. So, the people in the company were just learning how to program the circuit boards.

Uncle Murph: I think the first sort we did was on about 80,000 records and they were accounting type records. It probably took about an hour and fifty minutes for 80,000 records. Ridiculous, I mean once you got over 100,000 forget about it. But, a couple years later, some guys at MIT and IBM worked out a way to read backwards. Once we could read backwards, half of the tape time was not wasted anymore, so we could read backwards on one and forwards on the other. We could do it simultaneously. Unfortunately, that's the way things stayed for almost a decade, just mag tape. Almost ten years, no improvements. We're talking late fifties to late sixties now, no improvement, everybody waiting for this thing called disk.

Computer companies found that it was expensive to produce two different lines of computers, so they set to work to develop a computer which could perform both calculations and data processing equally well.