TRADIC

The TRADIC (for TRAnsistor DIgital Computer or TRansistorized Airborne DIgital Computer) was a transistorized computer built by J. H. Felker of Bell Labs for the United States Air Force in 1955 (1953 according to one source).

L.C. Brown ("Charlie Brown") was a lead engineer on the project and wrote the article "Flyable TRADIC: The First Airborne Transistorized Digital Computer", a history of the TRADIC, in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 21, No. 4, October-December 1999.

The TRADIC has been claimed to be the first fully transistorized computer, instead of the Mailüfterl, which went into operation in 1955. A declassified CIA document mentions the TRADIC being the first transistorized computer, operational in 1954. TRADIC had 700–800 transistors and 10,000 diodes. The TRADIC was small and light enough to be installed in a B-52 Stratofortress. As such, it was probably a special-purpose computer. It could perform a million logical operations every second, still not quite as fast as the vacuum tube computers of the day, but pretty close. And best of all, it operated on less than 100 watts of power and it was much more reliable than its vacuum tube predecessors.

External links

• Flyable TRADIC: The First Airborne Transistorized Digital Computer by L.C. Brown
• TRADIC - History of Media Technology
• TRADIC - History of Computing (1953)
• "COMPUTERS - The 1950s" including a photo of TRADIC and TX-0.
• TRADIC - brief