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TIFRAC (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Automatic Calculator) was the first computer developed in
TIFRAC (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Automatic Calculator) was the first computer developed in India
India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area; the List of countries by population (United Nations), most populous country since ...
, at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) is a leading research Institute under the Department of Atomic Energy of the Government of India. It is a public deemed university located at Navy Nagar, Colaba in Mumbai. It also has a centres in ...
in Mumbai
Mumbai ( ; ), also known as Bombay ( ; its official name until 1995), is the capital city of the Indian state of Maharashtra. Mumbai is the financial capital and the most populous city proper of India with an estimated population of 12 ...
. Initially a TIFR Pilot Machine was developed in the 1950s (operational in 1956). Based on the IAS machine
The IAS machine was the first electronic computer built at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey. It is sometimes called the von Neumann machine, since the paper describing its design was edited by John von Neumann, a ...
design, the development of the final machine was started in 1955 and was formally commissioned (and named TIFRAC, by Jawaharlal Nehru
Jawaharlal Nehru (14 November 1889 – 27 May 1964) was an Indian anti-colonial nationalist, secular humanist, social democrat, and statesman who was a central figure in India during the middle of the 20th century. Nehru was a pr ...
) in 1960. The full machine was in use until 1965.
TIFRAC included 2,700 vacuum tube
A vacuum tube, electron tube, thermionic valve (British usage), or tube (North America) is a device that controls electric current flow in a high vacuum between electrodes to which an electric voltage, potential difference has been applied. It ...
s, 1,700 germanium diode
A diode is a two- terminal electronic component that conducts electric current primarily in one direction (asymmetric conductance). It has low (ideally zero) resistance in one direction and high (ideally infinite) resistance in the other.
A ...
s and 12,500 resistors
A resistor is a passive two-terminal electronic component that implements electrical resistance as a circuit element. In electronic circuits, resistors are used to reduce current flow, adjust signal levels, to divide voltages, bias active e ...
. It had 2,048 40-bit words of ferrite core memory
In computing, magnetic-core memory is a form of random-access memory. It predominated for roughly 20 years between 1955 and 1975, and is often just called core memory, or, informally, core.
Core memory uses toroids (rings) of a hard magnet ...
. This machine was an early adopter of ferrite core memory.
The main assembly of TIFRAC, which had vacuum tubes was housed in a massive steel rack measuring 18 feet x 2.5 feet x 8 feet. It was fabricated from modules of 4 feet x 2.5 feet x 8 feet. Each module had steel doors on either side for accessing the circuits.
A cathode-ray tube
A cathode-ray tube (CRT) is a vacuum tube containing one or more electron guns, which emit electron beams that are manipulated to display images on a phosphorescent screen. The images may represent electrical waveforms on an oscilloscope, a ...
display system was developed to serve as an auxiliary output to the computer for analogue and digital display of both graphs and alpha-numeric symbols.
A manual console served as the input/output control unit of the computer. The software of TIFRAC were written in a series of commands of 0s and 1s (machine code
In computer programming, machine code is computer code consisting of machine language instructions, which are used to control a computer's central processing unit (CPU). For conventional binary computers, machine code is the binaryOn nonb ...
).
A British-built HEC 2M computer, happened to be the first digital computer in India, which was imported and installed in Indian Statistical Institute
The Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) is a public research university headquartered in Kolkata, India with centers in New Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai and Tezpur. It was declared an Institute of National Importance by the Government of India und ...
, Kolkata, during 1955. Prior to that, this institute had developed a small analog computer
An analog computer or analogue computer is a type of computation machine (computer) that uses physical phenomena such as Electrical network, electrical, Mechanics, mechanical, or Hydraulics, hydraulic quantities behaving according to the math ...
in 1953, which is technically the first computer in India.
See also
*List of vacuum tube computers
Vacuum-tube computers, now called first-generation computers, are programmable digital computers using vacuum-tube logic circuitry. They were preceded by systems using electromechanical relays and followed by systems built from discrete transi ...
References
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