On this day in 1955 AT&T Bell Laboratories announced the completion of the TRADIC, the first fully transistorized computer. TRADIC, short for Transistor Digital Computer or Transistorized Airborne Digital Computer was built by Jean Howard Felker of Bell Labs for the United States Air Force. It contained close to 800 transistors, which replaced the standard vacuum tubes and allowed the machine to operate on less than 100 watts– a fraction of the power required by its vacuum tube predecessors. It could perform a million logical operations per second, making it almost as fast as the vacuum tube computers of the time.
