This article is about the Computer. For the Texas district, see United States House of Representatives, Texas District 2

The MIT Lincoln Laboratory

Lincoln Laboratory

MIT Lincoln Laboratory, located in Lexington, Massachusetts, is a United States Department of Defense research and development center chartered to apply advanced technology to problems of national security. Research and development activities focus on long-term technology development as well as...

 TX-2 computer

Computer

A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...

 was the successor to the Lincoln TX-0

TX-0

The TX-0, for Transistorized Experimental computer zero, but affectionately referred to as tixo , was an early fully transistorized computer and contained a then-huge 64K of 18-bit words of magnetic core memory. The TX-0 was built in 1955 and went online in 1956 and was used continually through the...

 and was known for its role in advancing both artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

 and human-computer interaction.

Specifications

The TX-2 was a transistor

Transistor

A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify and switch electronic signals and power. It is composed of a semiconductor material with at least three terminals for connection to an external circuit. A voltage or current applied to one pair of the transistor's terminals changes the current...

-based computer using the then-huge amount of 64K

Kilo

Kilo- is a unit prefix in the metric system denoting multiplication of the unit by one thousand.For example:* one kilogram is 1000 grams* one kilometre is 1000 metres* one kilojoule is 1000 joules...

 36-bit words

36-bit word length

Many early computers aimed at the scientific market had a 36-bit word length. This word length was just long enough to represent positive and negative integers to an accuracy of ten decimal digits . It also allowed the storage of six alphanumeric characters encoded in a six-bit character encoding...

 of core memory. The TX-2 became operational in 1958. Because of its then powerful capabilities Ivan Sutherland

Ivan Sutherland

Ivan Edward Sutherland is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer. He received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1988 for the invention of Sketchpad, an early predecessor to the sort of graphical user interface that has become ubiquitous in personal...

's revolutionary Sketchpad

Sketchpad

Sketchpad was a revolutionary computer program written by Ivan Sutherland in 1963 in the course of his PhD thesis, for which he received the Turing Award in 1988. It helped change the way people interact with computers...

 program was developed for and ran on the TX-2.

Relationship with DEC

The Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...

 was a spin-off

Research spin-off

A research spin-off is a company that falls into at least one of the four following categories:#Companies that have an equity investment from a national library or university#Companies that license technology from a public research institute or university...

 of the TX-0 and TX-2 projects. A TX-1 was planned as the successor for the TX-0, but the project was deemed too ambitious and was scaled back to the TX-2.
The TX-2 Tape System

TX-2 Tape System

The TX-2 Tape System was a magnetic tape data storage technology from the late 1950s. It is the direct ancestor of LINCtape, used on the LINC laboratory computer....

 was a block addressable 1/2" tape developed for the TX-2 by Tom Stockebrand which evolved into LINCtape and DECtape

DECtape

DECtape, originally called "Microtape", was a magnetic tape data storage medium used with many Digital Equipment Corporation computers, including the PDP-6, PDP-8, LINC-8, PDP-10, PDP-11, PDP-12, and the PDP-15. On DEC's 32-bit systems, VAX/VMS support for it was implemented but did not become an...

.