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UNIVAC's 50th Anniversary
A reader writes: "50 years may not sound like a whole lot of time. But in the computer industry it really is a great acomplishment. The UNIVAC is celebrating it's 50th anniversary."
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Philadelphia was the birthplace of UNIVAC, the first computer designed and built for non-military purposes.
Uhm, Babbage's analytical engine anyone? It amazes me how people ignore pre 20th century computing.
What's better? (a) a UNIVAC emulation project or (b) sex with a mare
What a silly question. I mean, the two aren't even comparable. One is a bit tough to do, but very rewarding. The other seems completely unnatural. B is the obvious answer.
Aliens have long wanted to conquer the Earth. But while possessing superrior space flight technology, they possessed inferrior weapons technology. So they came up with The Plan.
They deliberately crashed one of their vehicles into New Mexico in the 1940s. It was filled with solid state technology. Transistors, silicon, etc.
They GAVE us this technology in hopes that we would adopt it and grow dependent on it. And we have. The US gov't along with some selected companies used the tech to create the first transistor (Bell Labs), the first microprocessor (Intel), and so on. Later unleashing newer tech, MSI, LSI, VLSI, etc. It's still going on today ("Coppermine", etc.) Technology was disseminated slowly over time and across a great many companies, some outside the US to dissuede suspicion of the real source of all this new tech.
Well, we've since pretty much abandoned tubes, vibrators, points (automotive ignition), carburreated engines, core memory, and such. We are now totally dependent on silicon, microcontrollers, transistors, EFI, and other alien based technology.
And now, all according to The Plan, the aliens can now EMP the Earth from orbit. All our defenses would fail. Missiles would lay dormant in silos. The military would be powerless. Planes would fall out of the sky. Trains would stop. Cars would stop. All world financial information would be wiped out. Life as we know it would grind to a halt. The aliens would be able to take over easily, in the ensuing chaos.
Our early indigineous Earth science was a threat to them, because cars with carburreators and floats and points ignition, as well as communications gear, missile guidance systems, apollo space vehicles, and computers using vacuum tubes, relays, vibrators, ferrite core memory and such would all continue to operate under continuous EMP bursts and even in high radiation environments (such as a missile launched at the alien's space ship or home world). The aliens wanted to neutralize the threat and they succeeded.
Except for us few who realized what was going on. When the EMP pulse and the aliens arive, me and my buddies will be the only ones on the road in our 55 Chevy trucks, communicating on our refurbished army surplus PRC-25 radios. Tracking them on our klystron based radar, predicting their actions on our vacuum tube and core memory computers. Our bands of soldiers are in place around the nation, and around the globe. The "right wing radical" groups you today fear, will be the ones to defend humanity when the time comes.
Bring it on alien doods. We're on to you.
Remember, clock frequency isn't everything. Perhaps it just did very little in one clock cycle. For instance, an instruction that added two registers with n bits (I don't know what the real word size was) might take n+2 cycles whereas on a later computer it would take 1 cycle (or maybe less since it could execute in parallel with another instruction).
386. The Linux kernel requires protected mode.
Life is a psychology experiment gone awry.
The only interesting thing I could find in Unisys is http://search.unisys.com/search/default.asp?sectio n=allsections&q1=linux
--
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete Dutra
DBA, SysAdmin
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Sponsored by the Vacuum Consumption Board.
My airplane won't fall from the sky because of silicon. Why? Because the FAA, in its infinite wisdom and classic governmental inertia is only now realizing that electronic ignition might work in airplanes. Better late than never, I guess.
I (and almost every other light plane pilot on the planet) have MAGNETOS, big, heavy, wirewound spinning spark generators, with nothing more advanced than a diode for sex appeal.
I hear they're good for interrogating prisoners too, if you hook them up to a little sponge...
My dad was a longtime UNIVAC/Sperry Univac/Unisys (the power of 2) veteran.
The first keyboard I ever touched was on the 1108 at 2121 Wisconsin Avenue, Sperry Univac's DC office in the 70's. Rumor has it that they heated the building with air from the machine rooms there.
I gather that NASA really loved their machines, or at the very least had a bunch of them, because my Dad would spend weeks at the Cape. I'm still kicking myself for actually sticking all of those mission stickers he gave me onto things.
I dimly remember a story about how one of the guidance computers for an Apollo mission didn't have enough memory (core?) to hold the entire course after launch. As I recall, just after launch, they powered down the guidance computer, leaving the rocket on its own for a little while, and quickly loaded the rest of the program and rebooted the box. I think he said something about not telling the astronauts until afterward.
If you know anyone who worked on UNIVACs, ask them about the drum memories...
Which may have been used for buzz bombs guidance systems.
The V1 "buzz bomb" (so called because of the distinct "buzzing" sound they made while in flight, due to using pulse jet engines - really, one of these has to be heard to be believed - I helped set up for a demo of one of the pulse jet engines SRL built for one of their latest machine, a hovercraft powered by four of them - bone shaking loud and hot was this engine - truely a sight to behold) was a "set-it-and-forget-it" type system.
Launch down a track, aimed on a straight vector (via a combination of the track and a gyroscopic navigational system, similar to early rockets) towards its destination (London), a timer was set on the engine throttle. Knowing the speed of the V1, the timer was set to cut off the engine when it was over the target, causing the bomb to "glide dive" in (it had wings - it was basically a pulse-jet propelled airplane with a bomb inside). In fact, RAF pilots got quite good at deflecting these bombs by flying next to them, getting a wing underneath one of the bomb's wings, then rolling their plane to "flip" the bomb into a death spiral of sorts.
All of this changed with the appearance of the V2 rockets (though navigation was still horrible, these machines being basic forerunners of modern ballistic missles - they still were effective in promoting a sense of fear among the masses of London, because they could hit anywhere, without advanced warning - they simply fell from the sky)...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I used to work at Unisys, writing device drivers. It is actually a really neat place in terms of technology. The first time I toured their lab I was amazed at all the different types of technology in there. They had some old mainframes that had uptimes in years. Products that were over a decade old and were still in use and still solved the problem they were purchased to solve. As mentioned by some others, the ES7000 and its CMP architecture is pretty cool. By the way, although it does run Windows 2000 Data Center Server (heck, the release of Win2kDCS waited for Unisys to complete various improvements on Win2kDCS), it also runs SCO Unix. There was talk of other ports in the future. It is neat to have a windows/unix machine that supports hot swap of nearly everything (memory, processors, i/o devices) and dynamic partitioning. Can't be that bad when you consider that Compaq, Dell, and HP all have decided to OEM it rather than build a box of their own in that class. Plus it comes with IntelliFIBRE, a FibreChannel card that I wrote device drivers for! (Yeah, I am bit biased there...but who isn't about their work?) Making big computers, software for them, and services wrapped around all of that may not be sexy, but is profitable. Something that all those .coms can't claim. Still had $6.8 billion in revenue with $334 million in profit for 2000. Not too shabby for a bad year in tech.
-- soldack
Here's the link to George Gray's "online Unisys History Newsletter".
Excerpts:
Walker is one of the founders of Autodesk, and is the Jargon File's "J. Random Hacker" in the flesh. His fourmilab.ch web site is an interesting place to spend a rainy afternoon (I recommend The Autodesk Files).
Yes, there's a North American mirror, but I like the idea of slashdotting Switzerland. Damn gnomes.
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Why not try using a regular flatbed scanner? Scan each section of the tape, and write some code to read it?
Alternatively, why not build a reader? Go to your local college of engineering, and see if you can interest them in making this an undergrad project.
A stepping motor to move the tape, some LEDs and phototransistors to read it, a printer port, and some code. Fun for all: mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, and computer engineers.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Sorry, when you said "steel" I assumed they'd be punching holes, since trying to write to that with a mag head would be a galloping BITCH. Well, that does make it a wee more complicated. However, if you could find some old heads from somewhere (maybe use parts of an 8 track tape system? or maybe a cassette) it might still be something doable.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Eckert and Mauchly were not able to complete the construction of the ENIAC until late 1945, after the war had ended. The machine's importance thus lay in its design rather than in its usage. The ENIAC was the first calculating machine to incorporate the high speed of electronics into a design with a scale large enough to solve important real-world problems. Moreover, their experience with the ENIAC led Eckert and Mauchly to work on a second machine, the EDVAC, with the capability to store and modify its own instruction -- a machine that could be "programmed" in the modern sense. The EDVAC was not completed until 1952, long after Eckert and Mauchly had left the Moore School to form their own computer company. But the proof of principle of electronic computing shown by the ENIAC and von Neumann's famous technical report on the EDVAC's design inspired people around the world to begin to build computers. Eckert and Mauchly's commercial efforts were also important spawning the UNIVAC line of computers...
Von Neumann's name has been associated widely with the invention of the computer -- the most common computer design, for example, is called "the von Neumann architecture." During the war, von Neumann, who already had a well-established reputation as a mathematician, was much in demand. He led an itinerant life, traveling by train between Los Alamos, Aberdeen, and several other locations to consult on mathematical aspects of ballistics, shock waves, and weapon design. Los Alamos needed help with the numerical modeling of a triggering device for the atomic bomb, and von Neumann made several inquiries about the availability of high-speed calculating machinery for this purpose. Nobody thought to mention the ENIAC project to him, probably because Eckert and Mauchly did not have established reputations and the design seemed hopelessly ambitious. However, when Goldstein ran across von Neumann in 1944 on a train platform in Aberdeen, introduced himself, and told von Neumann about the ENIAC project, von Neumann took an immediate interest. Goldstine quickly arranged von Neumann's appointment as a consultant at the Moore School, adding yet one more job to his list of wartime consultin assignments.
By the time von Neumann joined the project, the ENIAC design was set and construction was well under way. Eckert, Mauchly, and others had already been meeting occasionally for more than half a year to discuss the design of the successor machine, the EDVAC. Von Neumann joined in on these discussions when he was available, every month or two. During an extended stay at Los Alamos, he wrote the Draft Report on EDVAC, which Goldstine distributed widely. Much to Eckert and Mauchly's annoyance, von Neumann's name was the only one to appear on the document. The report gave a lucid description of the functional design of the stored-program computer, using the abstract language and concepts of neural nets that had recently been invented by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts to emphasize the "logical design," rather than discussing specific engineering implementations. Once the war ended, von Neumann returned to the Institute for Advanced Study, where he ran his own computer project to test the value of the computer in scientific research."
Source: William Aspray's review of the book "ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer Company" by Scott McCartney
Seastead this.
The 8086 debuted at 4.77mhz. That was 1978. There was also an 8mhz and a 10mhz version. It weighed in at about 29,000 transistors.
120 characters isn't enough to explain it.
I remember working with the Exec 8 operating
in the 1970's, and occasionally seeing a
NON-SYMBIONT PRINT printout ejected by the
line printer. Apparently a non-symbiont print
file was a print file that had become orphaned
from a job run. I always wondered where they
got the word "symbiont" from. Years later, while
visiting the Smithsonian, I got a chance to
see the original Univac control panel close up,
with all of its rows of gleaming toggle switches.
Sure enough, there was a switch marked "SYMBIONT".
A great site for for more Univac memories is
http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/univac/
--- even the safest course is fraught with peril
Here is an example of ascii porn, which probably could have been printed by Univac. This stuff is still popular; a quick search on Google turned up lots of sites which are stocked. And it downloads quickly!
See what I've been reading.
It's a magnetic tape, not punched tape. Hole-punching was used only to mark bad spots.
I still have a UNIVAC I tape: steel, 50BPI, 8 track (6 data, 1 parity, 1 clock). Not metal powder on plastic, a ribbon of steel. Bad spots had to be manually located and marked by punching two holes, one on either side of the bad spot. This medium was still usable on a UNIVAC 1107 as late as 1968. I wish I could read the thing; it has some of my undergrad work on it.
I actually saw a UNIVAC I at Case Tech in operation when I had a tour of the place as a kid. And I once found a scrapped UNIVAC I console and tape drives in a surplus store in Washington, D.C. The tape drives used McIntosh tube audio amps to drive the huge reel motors, and those were valuable to the junk dealer. So were the big banks of electrolytic capacitors. The rest, sadly, was useless.
What ever happened to the ... royalty-free alternative to GIF?
It's called PNG now. Burn all GIFs; use PNG.
Will I retire or break 10K?
"ENIAC got the glory. UNIVAC went to work" and look where we are. Calculators that can do the same work a computer that took scientists massive spaces and long years to make. It's kind of scary in a way.
--NovaScorpio
Matt
Seeing as the linux kernel can only be compiled on a 286 and above (as far as I know) I don't think it has been done yet. Then again, OpenBSD might have done it... They might not be linux, but they've done pretty much everything.
--NovaScorpio
Matt
There, a steel UNIVAC control panel, bolted to a desktop and mounted with switches marked "gamma prime" and "overdrive," and flashing lights, sits near a mock-up of the company's latest mainframe workhorse, the ES7000, a powerful multi-processor network server that runs the Microsoft Windows operating system.
So, what you are trying to tell us, is that the companies latest mainframe doesn't run much faster than the original UNIVAC, right?
Feed The Need[goatse.cx]
hmmm, when you think about it, that might not be such a great idea...
D
Mad Scientists with too much time on thier hands
The first, last, and only tech news site on the net
To the larger culture (great unwashed masses? ;-) of today, "computer" and "Microsoft" are pretty much synonymous.
Some of us still remember when the public synonym for "computer" was "IBM machine" (and IBM did have an O/S called "DOS" before uSoft was a gleam in Billy's eye ;-).
A shrinking minority of us still remember when "UNIVAC machine" was the standard pubref for "computer", and Walter Cronkite stood in front of a UNIVAC box on live TV as CBS made early attempts to do live, evening-of-election-day results forecasts.
Believe it or not, but at the main radar center for Buffalo they are using a 50 year old UNIVAC. They work by the motto "if isn't broke, don't fix it."
And from what I was told, that location was one of the most "advanced."
The only scary thing about the whole place what the fact that in the machine room there was a pc running windows 3.1!
granted, difficult to setup, but oh the excution...
- Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.
Univac = 50 years old. 50 x 7 = 350 dog years.
Y'know, the Univac is not doing bad for something invented in the internet equivalent of 1650.
;-)
[For those not USian, the folk adage is that one year in a dogs life is equivalent to 7 years in the life of a human. Thus the term "Dog Years". Internet development time, etc has been seen as being very similar to this]
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
...and 2 days later, electronic porn celebrates its 50th anniversary.
*no text, foo!*
"To pass through the jungle; silence, courtesy, ferocity, as the occasion demands." -- Kamau, "Proper Passage"
A couple of days ago on the Letterman show, Dave was talking about his computer. He said he had something called a UNIVAC at home.
Now I know how funny that was.
Will code a sig generator for food
The introduction of the UNIVAC is "usually regarded as the beginning of the computer industry . . . it was really the first computer where they said 'computer for sale.
The computer covered at least 352 square feet of floor space and came with more than a dozen desk- or refrigerator-size and smartly named peripherals: Uniservos, Uniprinters, Unitypers. The garage-size central processing unit ran at a then-astronomical clock rate of 2.25 megahertz.
There's always sufficient, but not always at the right place nor for the right folks.
For what I know, still in the 80s many Personal/Home computers (but not only!) were not able to go higher than 1Mhz.
Maybe they have taken the wrong unit? 2.25Khz seems far more probable for 50s...
If you love God, burn a church!
Ewige Blumenkraft!
And then theres the ASCII version of goatse.cx.......
Why?
Sophisticated? A pyramid is basically a pile of stones. You don't need sophisticated analyses to build one, you just need a good quarry, a large workforce and a lot of patience. The fact that the pyramids were oriented pretty accurately to true north is impressive, but you don't need any particularly sophisticated computing techniques to do that either. All you need is the ability to build a wall that's level and a segment of a circle, and to find the center of the circle. Then, you need a plumb bob, some string and patience... Even the cathedrals of the 11th & 12th centuries were designed and built without mathematics more sophisticated than what you learn in a 9th-grade geometry course. Just because our culture can't conceive of engineering without dressing it in ten tons of academic drag doesn't mean that the builders of ancient times had to do things our way.
It amazes me how people ignore pre 20th century computing.
You know, I heard once that the design of the ancient Egyption pyramids was so sophisticated that the Egyptions probably had to use some kind of fairly sophisticated mechanical computing device. While records of the exact sort of technology they used haven't survived, it is fascinating to think that computers were used such a long time ago. It really makes you think.