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- Computer History 1966
The
Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency contracted with
the University of Illinois to build a large parallel processing
computer, the ILLIAC IV, which did not operate until 1972 at NASA´s Ames
Research Center. The first large-scale array computer, the ILLIAC IV
achieved a computation speed of 200 million instructions per second,
about 300 million operations per second, and 1 billion bits per second
of I/O transfer via a unique combination of parallel architecture and
the overlapping or "pipe-lining" structure of its 64 processing
elements.
This photograph shows one of the ILLIAC´s 13 Burroughs
disks, the debugging computer, the central unit, and the processing unit
cabinet with a processing element.
Hewlett-Packard
entered the general purpose computer business with its HP-2115 for
computation, offering a computational power formerly found only in much
larger computers. It supported a wide variety of languages, among them
BASIC, ALGOL, and FORTRAN.