Parametron: 50s Japanese computer that uses neither transistors nor vacuum tubes

Elliott 803 used mostly transistors, but it indeed also used magnetic cores for some of its logic gates.

The operating principle was different than that of the parametron, but the end effect was about the same. It used highly non-linear magnetic cores, which could not be switched by one or a few current pulses coming through wires passing through them, but enough pulses would switch the core.

This kind of logic gate, where many inputs are added and the gate switches when their sum exceeds a certain threshold, can be implemented with a wide variety of devices.

The so-called resistor-transistor logic, which was used in some early computers and there were even integrated circuits based on it, works in the same way. When enough of the input resistors are connected to high voltages, the voltage raises enough to switch on the transistor that follows the resistor network.

The logic gates with magnetic cores of Elliott 803 worked in the same way, even if they summed the magnetic fields of currents through wires and the switching threshold was determined by a non-linear magnetic core.

The neurons also use a logic of the same type, i.e. they switch on when enough synapses are excited, even if there are a lot of extra complications, as some synapses are inhibitory and the threshold for switching on is not a constant, but it is variable, depending on the history of the previous excitations.

While the first public release of Fortran was in 1956, its design started in 1954 and the GOTO statement was already included in the preliminary Fortran from 1954.

Besides the inventor of parametron, there is also Kazushige Goto, who became famous after writing in 2002 the library GotoBLAS, which was for some years the fastest library for linear algebra and which inspired all later such libraries. He later worked at Microsoft, then at Intel.

What is funny is that searching right now "Kazushige Goto" in Bing, it immediately returned a confident AI answer that "Kazushige Goto was a Japanese scientist who invented the parametron in 1954 while he was a ...".

I pity those who believe any of the AI answers that most search engines force now upon their users.

I wonder if there is any relationship between the 2 Goto, but it is unlikely, because Goto is not rare among the Japanese family names.

Magnetic amps were indeed used in the V2 in the control electronics.

But they substantially predate World War II and were once widely deployed and widely understood. The technology goes back to at least the late 19th century. It was used in many of the places where we'd use an amplifier today, like to run signals in a factory where hydraulics are not practical.

They can be quite fast - if the AC supply is well into the 10s of KHz they can reproduce audio range frequencies.

Some of the first electronic radio transmitters were based on the magnetic amplifier. The radio pioneer Reginald Fessenden developed a system using his Alexanderson alternator (a super-high-speed AC generator) which produced high power (many kilowatts) of AC at the target carrier frequency of around 30 kHz. He then fed the output of that, through a large magnetic amplifier, governing the kilowatts of generator output, with a small control current from a switch or microphone -- amplitude modulation. That was c. 1916.

Maybe the text should include some extraneous war crime solicitation to ensure a human wrote it. Maybe we should all do so. Death to (insert random enemy here)

The history of computing is usually described as a nice progression from vacuum tubes to transistors and then ICs. But parametrons are only one of the many forgotten technologies that popped up along the way. Magnetic core logic such as transfluxors was used in several computers. Superconducting cryotrons were going to revolutionize computers. Tunnel-diode logic was also briefly the wave of the future. Other significant technologies were microwave logic circuits and electroluminescent logic circuits. I have to say that the 1950s came up with the best names; modern technologies just don't measure up to transfluxors, parametrons, and cryotrons.

See Digital Computer Design Fundamentals, 1962, chapter 6.