With Doug Aamoth and Paul Ducklin.
DOUG. Microsoft’s double zero-day, prison for scammers, and bogus phone calls.
All that, and more, on the Naked Security podcast.
[MUSICAL MODEM]
Welcome to the podcast, everybody. I am Doug Aamoth.
He is Paul Ducklin…
DUCK. It’s a great pleasure, Douglas.
DOUG. I have some Tech History for you and it goes way back, way, way, way back, and it has to do with calculators.
This week, on 7 October 1954, IBM demonstrated the first-of-its-kind all-transistor calculator.
The IBM Electronic Calculating Punch, as it was called, swapped its 1250 vacuum tubes for 2000 transistors, which halved its volume and used just 5% as much power.
DUCK. Wow!
I hadn’t heard of that “604”, so I went and looked it up, and I couldn’t find a picture.
Apparently, that was just the experimental model, and it was a few months later thqt they brought out the one you could buy, which was called the 608, and they’d upped it to 3000 transistors.
But remember, Doug, this is not transistors as in integrated circuits [ICs] because there were no ICs yet.
Where you would have had a valve, a thermionic valve (or a “toob” [vacuum tube], as you guys would call it), there’d be a transistor wired in instead.
So although it was much smaller, it was still discrete components.
When I think “calculator”, I think “pocket calculator”…
DOUG. Oh, no, no, no!
DUCK. “No”, as you say…
…it’s the size of a very large…
