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Modern
Computers Are:
Electronic
"Switches" Vacuum Tube Interestingly, the ENIAC was not binary, but decimal! It used 10 vacuum tubes to represent the digits 0–9. Let's consider the
number 128 . Here is how ENIAC stored this number ( The ENIAC required 30 vacuum tubes to store the decimal 128. Ten for the 1, ten for the 2 and ten for the 8. In addition, it had to turn on 11 tubes. The Atanasoff-Berry (ABC) computer used vacuum tubes, too, but, unlike the ENIAC, the ABC was binary. The number one hundred twenty-eight is written like this in binary: 10000000. Thus, the ABC stored the number this way: Because each binary digit can only be 0 or 1, only one on/off switch (here, a vacuum tube) is required for each digit. Thus, although 10000000 is longer than 128, it can be stored with only 10 switches (instead of 30) and only requires turning on one switch (instead of 11)! This disparity grows even worse with larger numbers. |
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If you encounter technical errors, contact rit@calvin.edu.
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