Philco computers

After the company developed the surface barrier transistor, which was much faster than previous point-contact types, it was awarded contracts for military and government computers.

The TRANSAC S-2000 mainframe computer system was first produced in 1958, and a family of compatible machines, with increasing performance, was released over the next several years.

Philco surface-barrier transistors were used in TX-0, and in early models of what would become the DEC PDP product line.

Although relatively fast, the small size of the devices limited their power to circuits operating at a few tens of milliwatts.

Between 1955 and 1957, Philco built transistor computers for use in aircraft, models C-1000, C-1100, and C-1102, intended for airborne real-time applications.

The instruction set had 31 basic operation codes and nine opcodes for I/O [10] Philco was contracted by the US Navy to build the CXPQ computer.

At the time, Philco was the largest producer of surface barrier transistors, which were the only type available with the speed and quantities required for a computer.

It was packaged in a container about the size of a large office desk, and used only 1.2 kilowatts, much less than vacuum-tube-based computers of similar capacity.

The original S-2000 "TRANSAC" (Transistor Automatic Computer) released in 1958[18] was later designated Model 210; it was used internally at Philco.

The Model 211 was introduced in 1960, using micro-alloy diffused field-effect transistors, requiring significant redesign of circuits compared to the original.

It was later upgraded in 1964 to 2-microsecond core memory, which gave the machine floating-point performance greater than the IBM 7030 Stretch computer.

By that time competition from IBM had made the Philco computer operations no longer profitable for Ford, and the division was closed down.

Operations such as reading cards or printing were carried out through magnetic tapes, thereby offloading the S-2000 from relatively slow input/output processing.