Word: vacuums
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Learning About Life. Most scientists now agree that too much was made in the early days of the apparent similarities between computers and the human brain. The vacuum tubes and transistors of computers were easy to compare to the brain's neurons-but the comparison has limited validity. "There is a crude similarity," says Honeywell's Bloch, "but the machine would be at about the level of an amoeba." The neurons, which are the most important cells in the brain, number some 10 billion, and each one communicates with the others by as many as several hundred routes...
...today's standards, Mark I was as slow and awkward as a manual adding machine. In two years it was shoved aside by the University of Pennsylvania's celebrated ENIAC, which, as the first electronic computer, used 18,000 vacuum tubes as circuits and quick-acting switches. Though they were a big advance, vacuum tubes proved too expensive, too unreliable and too bulky: ENIAC weighed 30 tons and took up 1,500 sq. ft. of floor space. Until 1954, when Remington Rand (now Sperry Rand) first sold its UNIVAC to industry, the few computers in the U.S. were...
Computers did not really hit their stride until transistors and other solidstate components-tiny, reliable and cool-running-took over from vacuum tubes in 1958. The state of the art has been speeded considerably by the U.S. military and its pressing demands for larger, faster computers. One of today's computers can make more calculations in one hour than a Yankee Stadium full of scientists could make in a man's lifetime. Some of the more sophisticated machines can multiply 500,000 ten-digit numbers in one second. Even if no further advances were made in computer technology...
Last year Ivy Films struggled to suave under Gerald R. Mimno '65 and Christopher S. Johnson. This year Mimno wanted to leave the undergraduate organization to write a thesis and Johnson was a graduate student which made him ineligible to be an officer. Hunter was filled the vacuum...
...though, it was clear that not everything went as planned with Voskhod II. Its takeoff was normal, then it soared into a slightly more elliptical orbit than is usual for manned satellites, rising to 307.5 miles above the earth at apogee. Leonov took his vacuum stroll during the second orbit, when, as the Russians patriotically pointed out, he was over Russian soil. Then the spacecraft made 15 more orbits around the earth, followed all the while by U.S. trackers...