The remarkable transistor observes its 10th birthday

In 1948, Bell Telephone Laboratories announced the invention of the transistor. In 1958, the transistor provided the radio voice for the first United States satellite.

To advance the transistor to its high level of usefulness, Bell Labs solved problems which, in themselves, approached the invention of the transistor itself in scientific achievement.

First, there had to be germanium of flawless structure and unprecedented purity. This was obtained by growing large single crystals —and creating the “zone refining” technique which reduces impurities to one part in ten billion.

The junction transistor, another radical advance, spurred transistor use. Easier to design, lower in noise, higher in gain and efficiency, it became the heart of the new electronics.

An ingenious technique for diffusing a microscopically thin layer on semiconductors was created. The resulting “diffused base” transistor, a versatile broadband amplifier, made possible the wide use of transistorized circuits in telephony, FM, television, computers and missiles.

In telephony the transistor began its career in the Direct Distance Dialing system which sends called telephone numbers from one exchange to another. For Bell System communications, the transistor has made possible advances which would have been impossible or impractical a brief decade ago.

BELL TELEPHONE LABORATORIES

WORLD CENTER OF COMMUNICATIONS RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT

It’s New…It’s Fast…It’s Elegant

Monroe Velvet Touch 800 Adding Machine

The new colorful Monroe “800″ gives your business the unmistakable forward look—provides the “touch of velvet” that makes anyone a figuring expert. Its beauty of design and advanced precision keyboard bring gracious decor and streamlined efficiency to the truly modern office. Under this distinctive case is a mechanism built to endure for years to come.

Monroe Calculating Machine Company, Inc. General Offices: Orange, New Jersey. Offices throughout the world.
See the MAN from MONROE for
CALCULATING
ADDING
ACCOUNTING
DATA PROCESSING MACHINES

COMPUTER with MEMORY Speeds Inventory

MAKING molehills out of mountains of paper work, “Bizmac” will do in minutes inventory control procedures that formerly took months. Its high-speed memory, an electronic “scratchpad,” can “remember” stored data indefinitely and—on signal —release it in millionths of a second.

Developed by Radio Corporation of America over a five-year period for standard business operations, this four-million-dollar electronic data-processing system has just been installed by the U. S. Army at the Ordnance Tank-Automotive Command in Detroit. It was designed to perform electronically most of the voluminous clerical procedures involved in OTAC’s world-wide stock control program.
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It’s interesting that for all of their excitement about ENIAC and future computers, people still only thought of computers as giant calculators. I guess that’s because they hadn’t been paired with a reliable storage mechanism yet. It’s hard to have an airline database without a place to store the fares and tickets…

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Lightning Strikes Mathematics

EQUATIONS THAT SPELL PROGRESS ARE SOLVED BY ELECTRONICS

By ALLEN ROSE

SOME day, travelers may step out of a plane in San Francisco 10 minutes, by local clocks, before they left New York. That day has been brought closer by the work of two brilliant young engineers at the Moore Electrical Engineering School, University of Pennsylvania. Dr. John W. Mauchly (38) and J. Presper Eckert, Jr. (26) have designed and built, with an assist from Army Ordnance, the world’s first all-electronic computer. The speed and scope of this digital wizard will revolutionize methods of modern industrial design. It is expected to put mathematics back into industry as an economical, rapid tool, saving months of figure work and accomplishing part of the presently impossible. The plane, rocket, or wing, in which a passenger may travel well over 1,000 miles per hour is now just a ghost on a blueprint. Engineers at Republic Aviation Corporation say it is hidden somewhere under a huge mass of highly complicated mathematical equations. The engineers believe that those equations must be completely analyzed before any promises can be made about super-sonic speeds. The Eniac (Electronic Numerical Integrater and Computer) has made complete mathematical analysis of that kind feasible for the first time.
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Pro Football From Abacus To Computer

By Gene Ward

When it came schedule-making time in the National Football League, Commissioner Bert Bell used to lock himself in a suite of rooms at the Racquet Club in Philadelphia, sharpen a gross of pencils and stop all incoming calls.

He was a gregarious soul, this man who guided the pro game through its growing-pains era and he dreaded the self-imposed seclusion as a skipper of an ocean liner dreads being beached.

“But there is just no other way to do it,” he once told me. “Every owner has his pet ideas as to the schedule he wants his team to play, so the only solution is to do it myself and present it as fait accompli.”
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Automatic Betting Board Ousts ‘Bookie’ From Race Track

Practically eliminating the “bookie” of the race track, this automatic totalizer shows the betting odds on all horses racing, the total of races won and lost, and all details necessary to make a bet. The huge board is operated electrically from central controls, where reports of the races are received. A keyboard much like that of a typewriter regulates the rollers showing tallies. Reports are obtained by telephone directly from the judges’ stand.

The first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth.
Musical notes like these never existed before 3M invented the Digital Mastering System.

It uses computer technology to record every nuance of a piece of music in binary numbers. So that when reproduced, every note can be heard with such uncanny crispness and clarity, you can hear music the way Beethoven wanted it to be heard.

At 3M, by listening to people’s needs, we’ve pioneered over 400 products to serve the needs of the communication arts field. We’ve developed everything from videocassettes to lithographers tape to photo offset plates.

All because at 3M, we’re in the business of hearing. So let us hear from you.

3M hears you…

What’s New IN ELECTRONICS

BY WILLIAM J. HAWKINS

Game/teacher
Hook Intellivision to your color TV and its preprogrammed software lets you do everything from play games to learn a language. It has 60-by-92-line graphics in 16 colors. With keyboard, it’s $499. Maker: Mattel Electronics, 5150 Rosecrans Ave., Hawthorne, Calif. 90250.

The everything set
It’s a carry-along entertainment and information center—AM, FM, CB, public service, aircraft, and weather bands, three-inch TV, cassette tape—along with a built-in mike and sleep switch. Six D cells power it. It’s $249.95, from Sampo, 1050 Arthur Ave., Elk Grove Village, III. 60007.
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This is the chapter about computers from a really cool text book called The World of Science, published by Golden Books in 1954.
You don’t often see people entering using a keypad with their middle finger…

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THE ELECTRIC BRAINS

THE BRAIN AT REST

Along one wall of the room tall gray cabinets are ranged. They contain the “gray matter” of the electronic brain. From the front they look as blank as a face without a thought. But open the doors at the back and you will see thousands upon thousands of tiny electric circuits wired with pink, blue, green, and orange wires. Those are the “nerve cells” of the brain.

Along another wall in smaller cabinets the brain’s “slow memory” or reference library is stored. Its “fast memory” is on a magnetized drum or other device inside the machine.

A neat, desk-sized set-up in the center of the room is what we might call the brain’s “ear.” This is where it receives its instructions.
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Interesting article about the consequences of computerization at the IRS.

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Big-Brother 7074 Is Watching You

By 473-28-0247 (Gannon, Robert)

No more chance to outwit the tax collector. His ultimate weapon—the 7074 computer—is about to take over the examination of our tax returns

IN THE rolling West Virginia hills, just east of Martinsburg, squats a low-slung, brick and cinder-block building. Inside, in a starkly antiseptic, 40-foot room, the head of a many-tentacled IBM computer waits patiently for your tax return.

If you live in a southeastern state, your time is up; a few days after you file this year, the machine will digest your forms, think about your figures for a millifraction of a second, spit them out if unsatisfied. If you live in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, or Washington, D.C, you have a year of grace; your turn will come next spring. By 1966, returns from every taxpayer in the U.S. will be fed to the Martinsburg machine.
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This is a pretty crazy way to store data.

Camera Snaps Answers
To speed recording answers in computing machines, Kodak has made a new camera that snaps 1,000 12-digit numbers a second. The numbers are photographed from a cathode-ray tube as spots; retranslated into electrical impulses by photoelectric tubes as desired for feeding back into the computer. Mosaic above is film section enlarged 25 times. A 100-foot strip holds 3,000,000 digits.

FOR THE MATHEMATICIAN who’s ahead of his time

IBM is looking for a special kind of mathematician, and will pay especially well for his abilities.
This man is a pioneer, an educator—with a major or graduate degree in Mathematics, Physics, or Engineering with Applied Mathematics equivalent.
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