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Memorial Tributes Volume 8 (1996) / Chapter Skim
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Jean Howard Felker
Pages 96-101

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From page 97...
... By late 1950 he tract demonstrated, with such devices, all the basic logic circuits of a digital computer, operating at a one megahertz rate, and had described in memoranda the architecture of a computer built on such elements. He hack already clubbed this computer TRADIC Transistor Digital Computer.
From page 98...
... They governed in Phase lI, and the resulting architecture was basic to Phase ITI. As fastjunction transistors became available, Felker convinced the Air Force to undertake Phase Ill.
From page 99...
... The National Academy of Engineering elected him to membership in 1973, citing him for "design of the first transistorized digital computer en cl for the engineering of digital systems." He was a founding director of Bellcomm, the systems engineering organization that served the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for the moon landings and thereafter, and was a director of the Colonial Life Insurance Company and its successors for some twenty-five years. It is clear from scraps of memoir that, from boyhood, Felker was both a practical tinkerer with things mechanical or electrical, and a dreamer.
From page 100...
... I recall his amusement at the inability of the army drill instructors to reform his shambling gait. Neither in his engineering nor in his private life did he accept conventional wisdom without supporting evidence.


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