Communications Engineered: The Bendix G-20 Computer System

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Hot on the heels of Bendix's valve-based G-15 computer came the G-20, built with transistorised modules. It had memory comprising 32,000 32-bit words[source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bendix_G-20] - analogous to 128K - with a 6μsec cycle time - very loosely equivalent to a 170KHz clock speed. 

More revealingly, the 84 milliseconds the G-20 took to divide a number gave meant it could do about 170 thousand floating-point operations a second. In contrast, in 2008, AMD released a graphics card that could do 1 million million floating-point operations in a second.

A dual-CPU version of this system, the G-21, could be used to play the early computer game "Spacewar!", as well as Chess via teletype. 

Bendix sold off its computer division to Control Data Corporation (CDC) in 1968. A few years later, a CDC Cyber 176 computer, situated in Arden Hills, Minnesota, was used in a match against internation chess master David Levy at the 1978 Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto. 

The Cyber 176 - playing remotely via telephone lines - actually drew its first game and won another, in the end losing 3½ to 1½. It was still an impressive result, and there was a feeling after the match that "there were no losers in Toronto"[source: Chess 4.7 versus David Levy, Byte, December 1978, pp. 84-90].

Meanwhile, the advert shows a classic "computer the size of a room" in operation at Humble Oil and Refining Company, Houston, Texas.
