What are the capabilites of the computers in 1950?

Question

what were they like and how did they work?

Answer 1

Let's just say that you would not have had any use for a computer from the 1950s. They filled up entire rooms, operated with glass tubes (transistors back then were highly inefficient), and were programmed manually by a team of people. For a performance comparison, the little chip in talking greeting cards is about as powerful as the most powerful computers available back then.

Answer 2

They were the size of a room.and used Vacuum Tubes instead of IC's and resistors.

they didn't even have monitors.

They had punchcards and large Tape Reels for storage.

They took massive amounts of power, and had very little computational

power as compared to the consumer-grade PC's of today.

Answer 3

Computers in the 1950 typically used vacuum tubs instead of resistors. They had very little memory and only performed calculations. They also took up a whole room. Bugs would get into these tubes and cause them to burn out. This is where the term "bug" came from.

In the early 60s, Bell Labs created the first multi-transistor chip. This would give lead to what we know computers today. Early programming on both the 1950 computers and 1960 computers required punch cards because of limited memory space. The program would have many cards with holes in them. They would be placed into the computer in specific order.

Computers had very little value outside the research world. It wasn't until Microsoft created the personal computer that normal consumers had any use for them.