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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 8 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 computing@calvin.edu.
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