Skip to main content

All Questions

Tagged with
4 votes
1 answer
437 views

IBM 650 - how many logic gates?

How many logic gates did the IBM 650 have? I'm used to measuring the complexity of a CPU by transistor count, but the 650 was a vacuum tube machine; the number of tubes would also be an interesting ...
rwallace's user avatar
  • 63.1k
52 votes
4 answers
7k views

Why did the IBM 650 use bi-quinary?

The IBM 650, announced in 1953, was the world's first mass-produced computer. It represented numbers in decimal, which is understandable, both because it needed to work with exact money amounts, and ...
rwallace's user avatar
  • 63.1k