Serial computer

A serial computer is typified by internally operating on one bit or digit for each clock cycle. Machines with serial main storage devices such as acoustic or magnetostrictive delay lines and rotating magnetic devices were usually serial computers.

Serial computers required much less hardware than their parallel counterpartcite book
last = Wilkes
first = M. V.
authorlink = Maurice Vincent Wilkes
coauthors =
title = Automatic Digital Computers
publisher = John Wiley & Sons
date = 1956
location = New York
pages = 305 pages
url =
doi =
id = QA76.W5 1956
isbn = ] , but were, as a consequence, much slower.

Serial Machines

* EDVAC – 1949
* BINAC – 1949
* UNIVAC I – 1951
* IBM 650 – 1954
* Elliott Brothers Elliott 153 – 1954
* Bendix G-15 – 1956
* LGP-30 – 1956
* Elliott Brothers Elliott 803 – 1958
* ZEBRA – 1958
* D-17B guidance computer – 1962
* General Electric GE-PAC 4040 process control computer
* Motorola MC14500B
* PDP-14

The first computer that was not serial (the first parallel computer) was the Whirlwind - 1951.

Most of the early massive parallel processing machines were built out of individual serial processors, including
* ICL Distributed Array Processor – 1979
* Goodyear MPP – 1983
* Connection Machine CM-1 – 1985
* Connection Machine CM-2 – 1987
* VIRAM1 computational RAM – 2003

References