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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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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.
In addition, you're probably interested in things that you can touch. They have always made mainframes and the software to go with them. There are two lines of machines: the OS2200 Series from the Sperry-Univac side of the company and the A-Series from the Burroughs side. Their latest machine (mentioned in another post) is the ES7000, a 32-way Intel box that can be partitioned into up to 8 independent machines in the same chassis (it will be able to run Itanium chips alongside P3's, when they are available).
Disclaimer: I play with the big-boy toys (A-Series) at Unisys, but I do not speak for them. That's what their webpage is for.
/ \
\ / ASCII ribbon campaign for peace
x
/ \
--
Babbage's engine was a theoretical exercise which was never actually built - at least at the time. It demanded engineering tolerances way beyond what was available back then.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Actually, they _did_ have precise enough manufacturing capability to build Babbage's machines - this has already been proven by the building of Difference Engine No. 2 at the Science Museum in London. Scientific American had an article on it, discussing how they built the parts to the tolerances specified, and the resulting machine worked excellently. Portions of the machine were built after Babbage's death, proving that it could be done (more info on this and other interesting Babbage info can be found here).
It is my opinion (shared by a lot of researchers) that Babbage failed primarily for two reasons; a) He could never "settle down" and build any one of his calculating machines, he was constantly dreaming of improvements and never committing to one design, draining his resources to the point of where they abandoned him (.com failure?), and b) his machines simply weren't practical for the time period, for their huge cost. People at the time didn't have a pressing need for enormous amounts of calculating power, that couldn't be provided for by cheaper human labor (so called later "computers"). It wasn't until the late 1800's that the need for real mechanical/electrical computing power began to be felt (look into Hollerith and the 1890 census for one take - there are others, of course, notably Lord Kelvin's Tide Predicting machine of 1876, while being analog, does demonstrate the need for mechanical models of complex computing problems - in fact, this particular use was not overtaken in any large part by digital computers until the 1950's), in fact, this was the time during which many "inventors" came forth with their own takeoffs of Babbage's machine - it should be noted that these were all portions of "Difference" engines, some original, some of Babbage's design. None were of the scale and complexity of his Analytical engine, though I believe a portion of the mill was completed by one of his sons after his death. It actually worked rather well, computing the successive sums of PI (though with errors, some tracable to machine problems, most likely spring related, but the major problem being that the input for the initial value of PI was off in one digit - thus, perhaps one of the first examples of GIGO as it relates to computers).
Thus, we have two points of failure: One, a character "flaw" (something that affects many hackers even to this day), and the second a lack of practical need.
It's too bad - his machines could have radically shaped our world...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
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
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
If you love God, burn a church!
Ewige Blumenkraft!
If the term 'all electronic' is left out then Konrad Zues's Z1 and Z2 computers beat UNIVAC by ten years.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Actually the replica is built with tolerances easily obtainable at the time, the difference engine did not require tolerances any more demanding than a clock. The victorians were rather good at those.
Babbage never completed because he was the first nerd, he kept redesigning the system and would never commit the design to manufacture. What Babbage needed was a PHB to kick his ass and force him to meet a ship date.
The article is still incorrect however, the ENIAC was only completed after the war. The Bletchley park machines were completed long before that, in time to actually be of use.
Mind you probably not surprising for an article that is probably written strraight from a corposate PR piece for UNISYS.
BTW anyone know what UNISYS do these days? Are they just a glorified consultant shop? Do they actually have a product?
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/