Sperry Rand's Third-Generation Computers 1964-1980

3 A latecomer to the general-purpose, transistor computer market, Sperry Rand first shipped its large-scale Univac 1107 and Univac III computers to customers in the second half of 1962, more than two years later than such key competitors as IBM and Control Data. While this lateness enabled Sperry Rand to produce relatively sophisticated products in the 1107 and III, it also meant that they did not attain significant market shares. Fortunately, Sperry's military computers and the smaller Univac 1004, 1005, and 1050 computers developed early in the 1960s were sales successes, delivering enough revenue to keep the company alive for the era of integrated-circuit (third-generation) computers. After the transistor's development, further electronics research provided engineers with ways to put the equivalent of several transistors on one chip of semiconductor material. In 1958, Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments built a five-component IC using germanium. The following year, Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor produced an improved IC that used silicon. By 1961, both Texas Instruments and Fairchild were selling ICs with as many as 12 transistors. RCA in 1962 produced a chip that contained 16 transistors. The switch from transistors to ICs resulted in the third generation of computer hardware. As it became clear that ICs would eventually replace transistors, IBM formed a special internal committee in 1961 to consider its plans for computer development. In January 1962, the committee proposed that IBM's various transistor based scientific and business computers be replaced by one family of machines that would be suitable for all types of processing. With its top management having accepted the recommendation, IBM began work on the System/360, so named because of the intention to cover the full range of computing tasks. The IBM 360 did not rely exclusively on integrated circuitry but instead employed a combination of separate transistors and chips, called Solid Logic Technology (SLT). IBM made a big event of the System/360 announcement on 7 April 1964, holding press conferences in 62 US cities and 14 foreign countries. The System/360 comprised six models, which ranged from the small 360/30 up through the large 360/70. The CPU had a set of 144 instructions, which provided for fixed-point binary, floating-point binary, and decimal arithmetic. The word size was 32 bits, but many of the instructions could operate on single characters (8-bit bytes). Shortly after the original announcement, IBM revised the product line by adding the large 360/65 and 360/75 …