page_title: Transistor computer
section_title: Other early machines
hierarchical_section_title: Transistor computer / History / Other early machines
caption_attribution_description: English: TRADIC (for TRAnsistor DIgital Computer or TRansistorized Airborne DIgital Computer), the first transistorized computer in the USA, completed in 1954. The computer was built by Jean Howard Felker (visible at left) at Bell Labs for the United States Air Force, intended as a prototype for aircraft navigation and bomb targeting computers. Alterations to image: a small piece is torn out of the paper original along lower left edge.
context_page_description: A transistor computer, now often called a second generation computer, is a computer which uses discrete transistors instead of vacuum tubes. The first generation of electronic computers used vacuum tubes, which generated large amounts of heat, were bulky and unreliable. A second generation of computers, through the late 1950s and 1960s featured circuit boards filled with individual transistors and magnetic core memory. These machines remained the mainstream design into the late 1960s, when integrated circuits started appearing and led to the third generation computer.
context_section_description: During the mid-1950s a series of similar machines appeared. These included the Bell Laboratories TRADIC, completed in January 1954, which incorporated a single high-power output vacuum-tube amplifier to supply its 1-MHz clock power.
  The first fully transistorized computer was either the Harwell CADET, which first operated in February 1955, although the price paid for this was that it only operated at the slow speed of 58 kHz, or the prototype IBM 604 transistor calculator. The Burroughs Corporation claimed the SM-65 Atlas ICBM / THOR ABLE guidance computer (MOD 1) that it delivered to the US Air Force at the Cape Canaveral missile range in June 1957 was "the world's first operational transistorized computer".  MIT's Lincoln Laboratory started developing a transistorized computer the TX-0 in 1956.
  Further transistorized computers became operational in Japan (ETL Mark III, July 1956), in Canada (DRTE Computer, 1957), and in Austria, (Mailüfterl, May 1958), these being the first transistorized computers in Asia, Canada and mainland Europe respectively.
caption: TRADIC
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