UNIVAC 1108 COMPUTER

Introduction

“Universal Automatic Computer” is how you spell it. On March 31, 1951, UNIVAC computers were created. The first electrical digital computer used for business purposes was the UNIVAC I. John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert were responsible for its design. They also created the first general-purpose computer in history, the ENIAC. To replace the punch card accounting computers of the day, the UNIVAC I was created as a commercial data processing system.

First generation computers

1946 through 1954 marked the existence of the first generation of computers. The first computer ever created, the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator), was created at the University of Pennsylvania in 1947. The switching tubes in this computer were vacuum tubes. By the time EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator) was launched in 1947, Von Neumann had already established the idea of stored programmes.

One of the five first-generation computers is the UNIVAC, which is also a first-generation machine.

UNIVAC 1108

In 1964, the 1108 was first launched. Thin-film memory, which was employed by the UNIVAC 1107 to store register data, was superseded by integrated circuits. Two key design enhancements, base registers and new hardware instructions, were included, in addition to faster components. As a programme was swapped in and out of main memory, its instructions and data could be stored wherever each time it was reloaded thanks to the two 18-bit base registers. The 1108 included memory protection, utilising two base and limit registers with 512-word resolution to facilitate multiprogramming.

Further details

Double precision arithmetic, double-word load, store, and comparison instructions were among the additional 1108 hardware instructions. Up to 16 input/output channels for peripherals are possible on the CPU. The 128-word ICR (Integrated Control Register) stack was the only component of the 1108 CPU that wasn’t developed using discrete component logic cards. These cards each had a 55-pin high-density connection that connected to a machine wire-wrapped backplane. Additional hand-applied twisted pair wiring was used in order to perform backplane connections with sensitive timing, connections between machine wire wrapped backplanes, and connections to the I/O channel connector panel in the lower area of the CPU cabinet.

Sperry Rand introduced the UNIVAC 1108 just as the first UNIVAC 1108 systems were being delivered in 1965. This model supported multiprocessing and had up to three CPUs; four memory banks totaling 262,144 words; and two independent programmable input/output controllers. The machine became the UNIVAC 1100/20 after Sperry Rand switched out the core memory for semiconductor memory. The last digit of this new naming scheme represented the number of CPUs in the system.

The next generation of computers

There are five generations of computers, with the UNIVAC being one of the earliest. According to the methodology used to evaluate the advancement of computer technology, the first generation was based on vacuum tube computers, the second on transistor computers, the third on integrated circuit computers, the fourth on microprocessor computers, and the fifth on ULSI technology incorporating artificial intelligence. The fifth generation is the most sophisticated and outpaces all earlier ones in speed.