The NEC Corporation in Japan was one of the leading manufacturers in the field of technology in the East. It was one of the first companies to experiment on transistors and develop transistorized computers in the region. NEC was also the first company to include a digital computer in their product line up. This model is better known as the NEAC 1101.
It was in 1954 when NEC, short for Nippon Electric Company, began looking into the feasibility of developing and mass producing computers. They began experimenting with crossbar switching systems and even invested in the development of other types of electronic switching systems. Multiple other researches began including those on the parametron devices and other hardware.
Four years later, NEC developed their first ever digital computer, the NEAC 1101. It made use of a transformer-coupled system that is designed with a winding structure. By then, they were already successful in their attempt to develop the parametron devices. Eiichi Goto successful invented them. And this computer was the first model to incorporate them. There were around 3600 devices allotted for the floating point arithmetic units, the first computer to ever do so in the market.
Compared to the other existing models, NEAC 1101 is pretty efficient in its computations. It uses only around three microseconds to complete additions and subtractions and around eight microseconds to perform multiplication and division operations. The model utilized a ferrite core memory, enough for 512 words although the initial version only accounted for 256 words. It uses 29 different types of instructions. Instructions are inputted via a punched paper tape. The instructions are fed into the system and scanned by a reader. The result of the operations would then be shown via a typewriter.
There was no doubt that NEAC 1101 was a massive success. It cemented the usefulness of parametron devices and NEC went on to develop more advanced models that utilize these devices.
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