Well we have come quite a way from Univac of the early 1950's.
The UNIVAC I was designed as a commercial data-processing computer, intended to replace the punched-card accounting machines of the day. It could read 7,200 decimal digits per second (it did not use
binary numbers), making it by far the fastest business
machine yet built. Its use of Eckert's mercury delay lines greatly reduced the number of
vacuum tubes needed (to 5,000), thus enabling the main processor to occupy a "mere" 14.5 by 7.5 by 9 feet (approximately 4.4 by 2.3 by 2.7 metres) of space. It was a true business machine, signaling the convergence of academic computational research with the office automation trend of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As such, it ushered in the era of "Big Iron"—large, mass-produced computing equipment.
Earlier computers had used relays
A
relay computer is a computer system built primarily using electromechanical
relays and
relay logic. Obsoleting most of the earlier
mechanical computers, relay were a short-lived technology during the late 1930s to early 1950s. By the late 1950s technology has shifted almost exclusively to
vacuum tubes. From the mid 1950s onward,
vacuum tube computers superseded relay logic.
When was the last time any of you have seen a vacuum tuve anywhere. They are still around, but not in most of the electronics that any of us use.
