Mark I
When the Mark I started running in 1951 reliability was poor. The primary concern was the drum memory system, which proved to break down all the time. Additionally, the machine used 4,200 thermionic valves that had to be replaced constantly. The Williams tubes, used as random access memory and registers, were reliable but required constant maintenance. As soon as the system went into operation, teams started looking at solutions to these problems.
One team decided to produce a much smaller and more cost-effective system built entirely with transistors. It first ran in November 1953 and is believed to be the first entirely transistor-based computer. Metropolitan-Vickers later built this commercially as the Metrovick 950, delivering seven.
Read more about this topic: Ferranti Mercury
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—George F. Will (b. 1941)