What would 1950s PCs look like?

"And here, now, the lucky consumer of the Nineteen Fifties can purchase his own Personal Computation device. Only taking up a normal sized garage attachment on your home, this can be yours for the small price of $ 199,999 (not including state and local tax)."
 
I think they'd be analog - they'd have to be practical size. Maybe this could offer an alternative path to miniaturization - a technological road not taken in our time line. Instead of making each switch/circuit tiny and including millions of them (as per modern digital technology), stick to huge switches/circuits, but make each one perform/store a range of functions & values.

Since this is the 1950s, ideally they'd also be powered by a lump of the fuel of tomorrow (plutonium), be made from shiny Aluminium, and have tail fins.
 

NothingNow

Banned
WI in the 1950s personal computers were invented then? What would they look like?

They would be Early Transistor/Late Vaccumtube powered beasts the size of a car that cost as much as a house. One would heat their home with their child's trigonometry homework, and the displays would be a mix of primitive TVs and Nixie Tubes (which look fucking bad-ass.)

Also, there would be chrome, and it'd be named something like the Oak Ridge or Fenotron and be produced by a company named something like General Computing.

Or it'd be a cheaper, crappier IBM 650 with a jet age look to it, hopefully done by a talented industrial designer, not an Automotive Design hack.
 
For you to have a PC-equivalent in the 1950's you would need:

1) that at last the transistor to be invented much earlier than in OTL (apparently a Russian inventor manage to do it but he didn't push it)
2) that the machines's programming to be software-based and not hardware-based.

Even so, they would to be big (maybe the size of two mechanical-based televisors) and not evey useful for the home user. But maybe institutions and corporations would use them (maybe as cabin-units of the size of big arcade games)?

A possibility is that such units would or be connected to local central computers ("servers"?) or through the teletype network - a primitive BBS-based internet.

I like to think that such machine would be called "Logics" (after Murray Leinster's short Story "A Logic Named Joe" - that predict both the PCs and the Internet).
 
Everyone's talking about the innards of the 1950's *PC -- which I agree are a challenge -- but let's not forget that I/O was dominated by punch cards until the mid-to-late 1970s. If you thought hooking that cassette player up to your Atari 400 was wonky, wait until you spend 20 years with a paper-based storage system....
 
Everyone's talking about the innards of the 1950's *PC -- which I agree are a challenge -- but let's not forget that I/O was dominated by punch cards until the mid-to-late 1970s. If you thought hooking that cassette player up to your Atari 400 was wonky, wait until you spend 20 years with a paper-based storage system....

Certainly, that is one of the points that should change, even if the 1950-PCs stay only for the government/commercial use.

If we admit earlier transistors, maybe the input/output could be although teletype-like terminals (maybe with crude CRTs?) and program storage in cartridge-like units.

The disponible programs would be the most simple: Earlier DOS-like word processing, spreadsheets, databases and maybe remote data transfer.
 
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