Designed to interface with a punch card machine from French manufacturer Bull, it contained several hundred vacuum tubes and could be used to add and subtract numbers stored on those punch cards.

But before even those transistor-based computers is a retrocomputing era rarely touched on: the era of programmable vacuum tube machines. [Mike] has gone back to the 1950s with this computer which ...

In January of 1954, supported by the military, engineers from Bell Labs built the first computer without vacuum tubes. Known as TRADIC (for TRAnsistorized DIgital Computer), the machine was a mere ...

but a representation of ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator Analyzer and Computer), the gigantic machine credited with starting the modern computer age. ENIAC, with its 17,468 vacuum tubes ...