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Old Computers Exhibit
prostoalex writes "Arthur Lavine was working for Chase Manhattan bank as a principal photographer. Computer Museum runs an exhibit of Arthur Lavine's photographs of old computer and data processing equipment. Fifteen black-and-white photos from the era where computers were still heading for 1.5 ton benchmark."
a time when computer geeks looked respectable.
...my first thought being, "Wow, I didn't know Avril was that smart!. Ugh.
:-)
I worry sometimes, I really do.
Meep meep
Looking back through old films, textbooks, documents, etc. when "computer operator" is mentioned as a prospective career for people.
Ah, if only I could be paid to be a computer operator....
for 2 + 2 = 4.
Great people don't need people to complete them, great people complete other people. -- Matthew Pawlikowski.
That's the inside of a VCR. You can't fool me.
Fifteen black-and-white photos from the era where computers were still heading for 1.5 ton benchmark
Its amazing that all those years ago people knew that mhz was a useless "benchmark"...
difference from then and now is that we have desktop computers to look at porn.
Come on, you know that operator with the thick glasses is just waiting for the porn to come out.
Really cool pictures. I love the first two - they look like something from a Kraftwerk LP (or CD) cover.
TC - My Photos..
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Its quite interresting (and funny), actually.
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this 120 chars is too small to contain.
At the age of 6, my dad dad took me to his workplace which looked exactly like on these pictures (IBM 370, I guess). One of the coolest things was reel-to-reel tape drive that actually PLAYED HYMN of our country (Russia)! The sound was very low and was seemingly made by moving the tape fast in very small steps.
:), shouldn't it be a must for any geek house? ;)
By the way, the purpose of my visit was to play a game called "Klings" - some kind of strategy about alien invasion. It was text-based with some ASCII (or EBCDIC ?) art, had a decent plot and very smart AI.
And the raised floor, under which you could run the cables (or breed mice, which they did at dad's work
Its not fair.All you pre 1960's people get big whirling machines that would crank for days on end and then finally print out "Hello World". I get blazingly fast machines that already do everything. Its like Linux said "Back when men were men and wrote their own device drivers...". Look, I would write my own device drivers if I owned a device that wasn't already supported by Linux. Oh well... thats an excellent photo gallery, it reminds me of that movie War Games. Oh the memories I don't really have...
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
I'm guessing from the printouts that the photos were shot in the late 60's and early 70's, but there isn't much indication about what the people were doing (other than being near the computer) or how they were using the computer to do it. Are there any other links that would give some context to these photos?
You can also check out the Obsolete Computer Museum
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?" - Chris Knight (Val Kilmer)- Real Genius
Stretching a floppy disc into a long strip and wrapping it around a spindle. You must be able to store much more data than on a normal floppy. Where can I get one for my PC?
Virtually serving coffee
We're old enough, friend.
While we may not remember ancient machines that took up entire buildings, we've memories enough.
Would that I could find some general netizen who knew what gopher and archie were! Would that I might relive the days when IRC was about chatting, not about porn, warez and stolen content.
Throw in bits about the Commodore 64 and you sound even older.
Load * 8,1 was it? I can' bloody remember. Ahh.
Ah, the era when the computer operator got paid more than the currency trader. It's all been downhill since. Where did we go wrong? (The answer, obviously, is letting users have Windows.)
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
A Sun 15K only weighs 1.2 tons!
To go along with the pictures... I was wondering if any of our more experienced /.ers have any stories about these machines? I personally have never seen one up close but I'm sure that alot of us younger folks would love to hear about the quirks of these giants. Thanks in advance.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
The site ist here (german only).
Babelfish translation of the link above. There are some cool equipment a couple of clicks in.
No pictures of 80-column punch cards... :(
Don't let the bare directory format put you off--there are tons of neat things in that site, especially the big iron
You'd be amazed, but we still use a few of the round reel tape drives similar to those in these pictures. We tried to get rid of them but our users had a minor stroke. They said that certain government agencies only accept round tape and we are legally obligated to keep them. I'm not sure I believe them, but we still have the tape drives anyway.
Of course, IBM stopped manufacturing them over 15 years ago. Thank goodness the hardware so reliable. I guess that is why it costs so much, because they never fail.
The disk farm brought a smile to my face. Each of those dish-washer sized units handles a (removable!) disk-pack of 500M or so tops, probably less.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I don't know if we should feel nostalgic about it or what. Yesterday, there was this story about altavista and people were having trouble remembering when it was the best search engine. You expect them to remember that? And can you feel nostalgic about something which you have never seen and never used? I can't. That said I do appreciate the photographs, but for the quality of the photographs and the technique rather than the content. WHat is more amazing to me that these computers is the fact that this guy managed to take such pics using obsolete camera equipmenmt.
Maybe someday some future Steven Spielberg will make a movie out of it, the attack of the giant computers or something.
And I guess 20 years from now the next generation will be looking at our PCs and would be wondering too. I think the change from that era to today was caused by two iventions, the silicon transisitor and microchips. The next change will be probably quantum computing. And that would leave all our PCs as obsolete(maybe more) as these PCs are for us guys today.
What's under yellowstone?
Like the Line Printers and Real to Real. Line printers are still fast printers even by todays standpoint (Not the fastest but still pritty fast). And real to Reals are still being used for backups. You really should admire the Mechanical Engeering in these old machenes. Parts that are more easeally removable, The dependability of the mechanics (Sure the OS may crash more then now) but the hardware is pritty solid stuff. At we are one of the fiew companies (we only know of 4 other companies in the world) that maintain the old Prime Mainframes (althout that is no longer the core of the buisness) these are very dependable systems and their hardware puts PCs to shame in upgradability, scailablity and in design. They are impressive on what they can still do today.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Wasn't Arthur Levine one of the characters in Michael Chrichton's "Sphere"?
An interesting press release from AMD about that time says that the tonnage measurement for computers is misleading to consumers. They feel that past 2 tons, it just isn't that relevant.
In support of this stance, AMD also announced that the next version of their Ball-Peen processor would be called the Ball-Peen 3000 and not mention the 1.5 ton weight at all.
(Oh great. My bandwidth just got pummelled by the User Friendly people, and now a glancing blow by Slashdot. :)
Oops I be one of both. Sorry your site was just better than the site in the article though.
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?" - Chris Knight (Val Kilmer)- Real Genius
There's a spacewar program here. I'm guessing PDP-8 assembly (PAL8), dated 1/11/71.
It's amazing. Games. There are always games. Anyone have a translator?
/ SPACE WAR PAL8-V7 1/11/71 PAGE 1
1 / SPACE WAR
2 /
3 / INTERPLANETARY DEATH AND DESTRUCTION ON YOUR
4 / LAB-8
5 /
6 / EVAN SUITS
7 /
.
.
.
Oh dear - I started as computer operator. That was the most high-tech job available back then, next to programming of course. And it was often 'women's work'. (It was my experience that programmers were mostly women too cause most guys wouldn't be caught dead in front of a keyboard, [but they built the keyboards and mainframes] but that's for another thread) Of course 'computer' meant a large room full of mainframes. Tapes, cards, maintenance, backups, etc. Those vax disks pictured - ours were only 10MB, and you needed carts to move them around. Just look at those pictures again - that giant box with huge round platter drive on it- to hold 10 MB - so to get 100 MB you needed a room full of disk drives! An 8088 that was coming out right around the same time also had a 10MB drive. What a difference. Had to count in octal (thus my silly nick) cause the 32 bits were on the outside of some units - 0s and 1s - you pressed them in to turn them on. There are many things and many friends I wish I could have had photos of, but since 12 yrs of that time were in secret labs working for DoD, cameras weren't allowed.
Octal - aka 'The Lab Rat'
click me
at the place I used to work, we had alot of reel-to-reel tape drives. When we finally unplugged the pr1me computer (1992 or so) we had to buy a reel unit that worked with a pc. we still have like one old 386 that the unit works with. It's the only machine we have that works with that unit for some reason.
The first computer screen I ever sat at was one like these on the pictures. When operational, it had every screen row underlined with a dotted line - somewhat akin to lines in a school notebook. The cursor was a triangle pointing down from the top of the character.
:)
Few years later I had a hard time getting used to displays without these dotted lines, like I was afraid of my sloppy writing
For those that don't already know, the "alternative photography" site above is a JS.Winbomb.d virus-equipped site. Probably old news to some around here, but a warning for the others...
So, I may be a bit behind the times, but did we ever hit that 1.5 ton bench mark?
in GUI technology
eat your heart out Jef Raskin!!available at IBM Archive
I would have liked to see some captions explaining the pictures. Otherwise, good job.
"Do I dare disturb the universe?"
Thanks! I was just kidding about the bandwidth. Traffic is good!
Bolo's Computer Museum is a collection of old computers started by Yves Bolognini. Some of the computers are exposed at EPFL, and they all work.
I remember tape drives all too well. Wish I didn't.
In the US Line Printers are still used to print multicopy forms like W2's and 1099's. Atlease until they come up with a laser printer that can print though 9 sheets of paper at once.
Yes I know that some companies use laser printers for W2's, but ask your forms suppiler how many people still use multipart carbon mailers.
If you want to see puch cards and 9-track tape drives.
I have a question...
What is the oldest still working computer ? Even if it's only turned on once a year for exhibits...
What is the oldest computer still in real use ? Pioneer I or some old bank datacore ?
OK, that was two questions...
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Everything else does appear circa 1969-1970. There's a Frieden calculator from 1970 on top of one of the cabinets in one of the pictures of the disk farm, I think.
What is the programming language shown with the "DATA" statement? Based on the line numbers and qualified names, I'm guessing RUSH (remote use of shared hardware), which was IBM's timesharing cross between Basic and PL/1 that was briefly popular in that era.
I have seen old pictures of computers but this guy really knows how to take photographs.
No GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR? Then I'm not interested.
I hate it when Slashdot tells me to be quiet. Screw you, Slashdot!
If you've been to the tech museum in san jose, you know that it sucks. THIS was what I was expecting.
For those who remember......
Beagle Brothers Online Museum:
http://www.panic.com/~stevenf/beagle/
I am just interested in PC's starting from the apples and the IBM pc and compatibles. Pre Windows 3.0 is what I'm mainly interested in.
Most computer geeks who have been geeking for a while usually tend to have a large collection of old computer gear.
:(
Unless of course your wife makes you throw them away.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
Clear, uncluttered, magnificant gray tones (what if they are in color?!?) and a realistic depiction of career life at that time. Is anybody capturing similar pictures of life as we live it now?
Do you realize you've just created dozens of potential stalkers?
except if you're married...
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
The 370's also had something like a floppy somewhere deep inside, from which their instruction set got loaded. If NASA was doing bleeding-edge research on the model 91, then maybe they would be messing with the instruction set, trying to find ways to use the parallelism, etc. Might the instruction set or parts of it have been on that drum?
Programs were different then because they had to work around the limitations of the hardware, especially the storage hardware. With a tiny amount of relatively fast RAM, and several very slow tape drives, you had to process all your data sequentially. You'd use merge sorts, from one set of tapes to another, to order and group the raw data. A program never had an entire database accessible all at once. That's why nobody minded the file orientation of COBOL.
Today, a lot of databases fit entirely in RAM, and that trend will continue. When database servers measure their RAM in TBs, they may not even need disk storage except for archives (if they can't use NVRAM). There probably won't be a need to maintain server farms, except maybe to queue/dequeue the I/O for the database server. Something's always the bottleneck.
Did you play the game on IBM 370? I played the "Klings" on "Iskra-226" - it took me 15 more years to hear about the Star Wars (or is that the Star Trek? call me ignorant, I don't own a TV and don't intend to...) with its Klingon language (which I learned about in the first place by seeing the TeX metafont packages for Klingon :-)
My favourite of the Soviet-era computing is the BESM-6 - the last masterpiece work before the "party line" called for the Western computers cloning. This article (in Russian) has a photo of one, if we're talking pictures here...
VKh
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those...
This is my sig, there are many like it, but this one is mine...
Do you also notice the change in dresscode from back then? Most of the people you see on those photographs wear suits and tie; such clothes are quite hard to find in the typical computer halls of today.
When did this change happen? Was it when computers changed from being a purely military project and moved out into academia?
Up until three years ago, all I worked on were mainframes for DoD..mostly VAX but some old Honeywell and Sperry/Unisys stuff too. Now I'm working for a certain troubled telecom (rhymes with uhmmm...SwirledCom)...sigh, I'm not sure which is worse:(
The best keyboard in the world!
Back on topic... the pictures are great! They remind me of photographs of the old Volkswagen factory back in WW2, taken by a industrial photographer (whose name escapes me). Crystal clear, excellent composition, and they add an importance to the subject that would be lost if you were looking at a reel of tape, or a pile of fenders. I would love a hi-res collection of these!
Drums were popular on early military computers.
I used to use several minicomputers (PDP-11/20, Honeywell H316) that ran off head-per-track disks. The seek time was reduced to the time needed to electronically switch heads.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
NASA used them for many years, well into the Shuttle program, as telemetry, command and communications computers in their satellite tracking stations. How many people can say they have a computer with a "Battle Short" switch?
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
the day a c64 is classed as "antique" is the day I'm officially old (not even 25 yet)
Still, I did start gaming on the wood grain A2600, and moved on to the C64 over 13 years ago now.
(Interestngly that A2600 was still working up until a year or 2 ago, making it about 19 years old or so)
It it strange - we have many, many examples of automobiles - full piece, in pristine and running condition, lots of memoriabilia, parts, books, photographs, music, etc - as is fitting for something which has so radically altered the world (for good and bad).
The computer? Of the earliest examples, we hardly have anything - and what we do have is scattered. Part of it can be attributed to the fact that early machines weren't built in great numbers, but a lot of it is simply because computers have almost always have been seen as "disposable" when they became "obsolete" - and not worth saving. Very few magazines and books from the "early days" of commercial computing (1950-1970) are still around - no one really cared about the things - photos of computers don't evoke emotions in most people, and contemporary books from the period are worthless in most people's eyes because the technology is "obsolete" (though these same contemporary books offer valuable historical viewpoints).
All of this has been mostly thrown away. I fear that one day historians will look back and not have any "first sources" to research and study in order to figure out how we got from there to here - it is only getting worse with today's machines - a lot of them are disappearing quickly into landfills, or being processed in other countries for the metals - I am not saying all computers should be saved, but one would think there would be something like the Smithsonian or Air and Space Museum for computers, some place where this stuff could be preserved for the future (the few museums that do exist are either running on a shoestring or have closed - and who knows where the exhibits go to).
If you ever have the chance, check out the computer museum in downtown San Diego - it has a pretty extensive collection of computers (including some Hollerith punches) that has to be seen if you are any sort of computer geek. I was impressed and amazed - but even its collection only represents a drop of the variety that used to exist...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
If anyone hasn't read it...
o f-Mel.html
The story of Mel:
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/The-Story-
Another good place to browse around (if you're into this sort of thing) is the IBM Archive. In addition to what's available there online, the staff at the archive is extremely helpful- I sent them a quick email requesting a sampling of IBM advertising material from the '50s and '60s for a research paper, and they sent me (overnight!) a HUGE collection (photocopies of course).
...if some of you youngsters are curious about the funny-looking chain-like dohickeys hanging down in photo 10, they're exactly that: chains. They lightly brush the surface of the paper as it cruises by to dissipate static electricity, which helps the paper to stack properly.
"I love deadlines - I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by..." -Douglas Adams
Conceptual integrity in turn dictates that the design must proceed
from one mind, or from a very small number of agreeing resonant minds.
-- Frederick Brooks Jr., "The Mythical Man Month"
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