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."

Comments

whoa

[Morgahastu]

a time when computer geeks looked respectable.

Re:whoa

[Corporate Troll]

What schocked me most is that there was even a pretty girl that looks feminine in the IT department!
*sniff* I start to miss the old days....

Re:whoa

[AndroidCat]

Huh, I was thinking that if they had dark glasses, they'd all look like agents from The Matrix.

Re:whoa

[McFly69]

Hey, what the hell...? Are you calling me (and other female developers) ugly? Men! They can be just so mean! :(

Re:whoa

[McFly69]

So what are you saying, that we computer geeks now look like shit?

Re:whoa

[Morgahastu]

nah she was probably just delivering some coffee and muffins.

Too much MTV...

[semaj]

...my first thought being, "Wow, I didn't know Avril was that smart!. Ugh.

I worry sometimes, I really do. :-)

What's especially funny

[Chardish]

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....

Re:What's especially funny

[videodriverguy]

When I started work in the UK, the company I worked for had a requirement that I had to be an 'apprentice', and in my case that was as a computer operator. It lasted about 3 weeks - at 17, I had already taught myself Algol, Fortran and Cobol, so being an operator was a bit below me. Having said that, I won't forget the experience - I could probably still load tapes as good as anyone 8-). Needless to say I soon 'graduated' to programming. Ah - those were the days - NOT.

Still, it gave you some respect to see the computer was run via a motor generator to keep the power supply constant. Disks - what are they?

Of course, the average calculator has far more power than the machine I was programming/operating - 1 instruction took about 5 microseconds, IIRC. Still, a company of 2,000 people relied on it (gasp!).

Re:What's especially funny

[AppyPappy]

I used to be a "tape ape". It was not a very fun job. You spent your days swapping tapes, loading card decks, watching printers, distributing reports and running jobs. You spent the vast majority of your time on your feet. We even jacked up the console so you didn't have to bend over to reach it.

The only good thing was that you could drink on the job on night shifts. The only people who came to see you were the owners who who usually drunk themselves. You hid the beer under the floor where it was cool. The worst part of the job was the continuous exposure to air conditioning. It really wreaked havoc on the sinuses.

Re:What's especially funny

[Chris Mattern]

I worked almost ten years as a computer operator. I still work with people who are computer operators. Trust me, it's not as fun as you're imagining.

Chris Mattern

The good old days....

[GnomeKing]

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"...

Re:The good old days....

[Detritus]

I remember people bragging about the LPM (lines-per-minute) on their line printer. High-end line printers were fascinating to watch. They made a loud buzzing noise when they printed. Each column on the paper had a corresponding print hammer that would be fired when the appropriate character on the character drum was spinning by. They could chew through a box of fanfold paper in minutes. Truly impressive pieces of engineering.

The only

[Morgahastu]

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.

Re:The only

[McFly69]

It was hard before. Everyone would want to sneak at peak at you while viewing nudies.

Cool!

[tcdk]

Really cool pictures. I love the first two - they look like something from a Kraftwerk LP (or CD) cover.

Re:Cool!

[Ponty]

They're gorgeous photographs. Very artistic: he really captures the magic of the old machines and the culture of the employees. Man. I'd love those on my wall.

Real, Working Dinosaurs

[NumbThumb]

For those that are interested: The Informatics Department at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, has a (small) Computer museum with stuff from that era -- not photographs, but actual working devices. The site ist here (german only).

Its quite interresting (and funny), actually.

Re:Real, Working Dinosaurs

[kliklik]

From Commodore PET page: Das ROM umfaßt 14KB, in denen sich ein 14K-Basicinterpreter einer amerikanischen Firma befindet, die auch heute noch nicht in der Lage ist, fehlerfreie Soft-ware herzustellen.

<babel_fish>
The ROM covers 14KB, in which a 8K-Basicinterpreter of an American company is, which is also today not yet able, error free software to manufacture.
</babel_fish>

I wonder who that might be...

Great days these were

[Brother52]

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.

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 :), shouldn't it be a must for any geek house? ;)

As someone born in 1980...

[powerlinekid]

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...

Really cool photos but no context

[shoppa]

The pictures shown are very cool... but other than knowing they were from a major east coast bank there unfortunately isn't much context.

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?

Re:Really cool photos but no context

[mister_jpeg]

It's almost certainly a trading desk.
See pic 3 and -14 a big open room with phones on every desk, people waving hands in the background, and that dude in 3 has the look of a deranged risk manager.
Note that there are no terminals on the desks, those are probably phone systems for easy access to floor traders and brokers.
see pic 11- stock symbols for Texaco, Royal Dutch, and Marathon Oil, and EPS=Earnings Per Share. Y69- year 1969. I'm too lazy to go back and confirm quarterly earnings for 1969.

Re:Photography Museum

[ninthwave]

You can also check out the Obsolete Computer Museum

What a neat idea!

[melonman]

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?

Re:What a neat idea!

[danamania]

Wait until the new RAID striped tapes come out. The future will never be the same!

Re:What a neat idea!

[Lucas Membrane]

Back in the 650 days, memory was on a spinning drum. Good programmers were those who could organize their programs and memory so that the part of the drum that was currently accessible was the part that held the data that was currently needed. It was like juggling.

Some of this carried over into later areas with disks. I knew a guy who optimized his disk accesses (using the physical IO instructions) all the way up until the 4341 generation (around 1980), so that his programs could read the disks as fast as they spun.

The magnetic strip machines were called 'data cells', and they were top drawer technology in the late 1960's. All the very ambitious programs for randomly accessing big piles of data seemed to use them. But accessing the data involved having an arm pull the right strip out of a container, wrap it around a drum, read it and write it there, then put it back into its container. The mag were strips were subject to wear, and when worn, they didn't behave predictably, and they would get jammed up.

Re:What a neat idea!

[Tony-A]

There was a good reason to optimize the disk access. With unblocked standard sequental data sets on early 360's, the disk was within a few percent of the speed of a high-speed card reader or line printer, one record per revolution.

I'm appalled

[panurge]

The first computer I ever worked with looked like that. And worked like that. I feel even older than I did when I got up this morning.

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.)

It's true!

[nutznboltz]

A Sun 15K only weighs 1.2 tons!

Re:It's true!

[McFly69]

That is amazing. That is the same weight as 6, Mountain Dew drinking software engineers!

Some stories...

[powerlinekid]

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.

Re:Some stories...

[AppyPappy]

What's to tell? Imagine your PC spread over 2000 sq feet. Imagine a 300 meg diskdrive the size of a washer. We even had the console with the flashing lights. You could even punch binary commands using buttons on the main console (as opposed to the terminal console). The terminal console looked like something from Star Trek with two terminals embedded in a desk.

If you have ever loaded a 1000 card deck into a card reader, you know that times have gotten MUCH better.

Re:Some stories...

[nutznboltz]

You want a story? Go read Alice's PDP-10

If you want a to try a PDP-10 you can use KLH10. It supports TOPS and ITS.

Re:Some stories...

[bob]

They were a pain in the ass. Consider:

• The edit/compile/run cycle could take hours. I worked as a contractor at NASA Goddard in the early 1980s and we still had couriers that would run around from building to building, picking up card decks to run and dropping off the run card decks with their printouts. You actually spent hours sometimes pouring over hex core dumps because that was faster and less expensive than just trying things on a hunch to see if they worked.
• Proper procedure was that you wrote your program out, by hand, on 80-column "coding forms", which were 8.5"x11" paper tablets with green lines and shading and numbers and stuff. There were little boxes where you would print each character to be punched. Theoretically, these were designed so that you could hand them to a keypunch operator, but I never had a job where we could afford this -- you just punched them yourself. You still used the forms, however, because in some cases you'd have to wait in line for a turn at a keypunch. They made cabinets with special drawers to hold punch cards. When someone left a job, the remaining people would bicker over who got his drawers.
• Since persistent, cataloged disk space was so scarce, the more important measure of your space allocation was the number of hanger slots you had in the tape library. You'd get strips with number codes that you would insert in the plastic band around the 9-track reel, and then go hang them in the library (other sites I worked at made you hand them to the tape librarian). You might put a dozen or more files on a tape and then you'd have to remember how many tape marks to skip to get to the one you wanted. Standard labeled tapes were evil.
  Anyway, You'd code the slot number on in the JCL DD statement and when your job was run, the operator would have to scurry over to tape library to pull it off the rack, mount it on the drive, and push the acknowledge button on the console. Before they needed the tape drive again they'd pull your tape and hang it on the "ready rack"; if that tape was called up again they'd have it right there. But if you went over to pick up your tape shortly after your job ran, you'd often have to ask them to "check the ready rack", or, in the case of NASA Goddard, you could often walk over to the console and yank your tape off the ready rack yourself.
• I had one long-running linear least squares job that we could only run on standby. This meant that you'd submit a card deck to a special bin that could take days to empty. Late at night, after all the paying jobs were run, if there was time left in the operator's shift they'd load one of these jobs and let it run, for free, until the morning shift if necessary. This one particular job would crash in random places, and I was weeks pouring over crash dumps, even resorting to my own special little bit map that I'd use to indicate program status and progress at the point it crashed. Nothing did any good, crashes were completely random. A co-worker, more experienced than I, took a look at it, saw that it was mounting a tape and the tape always got put on the same drive. He told me to rubber-band a note on the deck to the operator, telling him to take that tape drive offline before running the job. It ran to completion that night for the first time.
• At a later job, the company I worked for used a timesharing service. We rented a whole disk pack, which seemed kind of extravagant but was in fact cost-effective given their pricing structure. This was a removable pack and it was kept offline most of the time, and was mounted when needed by a job. There were two ways to manage that space. You could simply code the pack's ID into the JCL and then access files through the on-pack catalog, or you could enter the files into the mainframe's master catalog. Generally, I preferred doing the latter, but I think I was about the only customer they had that did, because as I recall it caused all manner of problems for the operators.

BTW, I believe it was NASA's IBM 360/91 that I remember having drum storage for virtual memory storage. A drum was sort of like a disk drive except it was a cylinder with the magnetic material on the outside surface. Some drums, I think, had heads that moved up and down to read separate tracks, but this one had a long row of heads from top to bottom, reading the tracks in parallel. But I could be remembering it wrong. Anyone else remember these?

Re:Some stories...

[Lucas Membrane]

I started computing in 1967 and never saw a drum, but I worked with many who had used them on the old model 650 in the 1950's. This was the first business computer that IBM sold to many large bank/insurance type firms at that time. The 360/91 was one of the very largest and fastest models of the 360's about a decade later, and I doubt it had a drum for any of its main storage, as it was so fast. The IBM 360's were supposed roughly compatible and consistent all up and down the product line (not 100%, but at least they tried), but the Model 91 broke some of the rules at the high end -- much of IBM's software had special flags that had to be set to make it work on a 91. It was so fast that it introduced 'imprecise interrupts', ie it couldn't tell you what statement had caused an error, because it might be doing several things at once or be a few statements further along before it noticed a problem. This was a machine that could do stuff in a microsecond, ie one of the first that would actually do something like 1 MIPS. There were only about a half dozen of these things made, some universities, NASA, and similar operations. UCLA had one, but Caltech had to get by with a little model 75. There were stories of bigger 360's, a model 95 or model 195 that existed somewhere, but IDK where or for what.

Re:Some stories...

[panurge]

This is embarrassing but true...
The first day on site, I was given a pad and told to go find all of the tapes, make a list of the numbers and locations. It was a big department, but even so after 2 hours I still had a lot of gaps. Eventually I went back to my supervisor with the list, and explained that I couldn't find any tapes with an 8 or 9 in the numbers.

"That's because they're numbered in octal" she crowed. I can still remember feeling my ears go red - but I had learnt my way around on the first morning, which was the object of this bit of ritual humiliation of newbies.

Re:Some stories...

[Coplan]

My father always tells me about the times when he had to program the machines with his punch card stacks. He had prepared them off-site, but then he was on his way to enter (insert) them into the computer at the computer building. Someone had bumped him, and he dropped his box filled with these cards. He hadn't numbered the cards, as he figured he could just pull from the top, and the order wouldn't be lost. After that bump, and several hours of work that might as well be lost, he remembered to number his cards from there-on-out.

Re:Some stories...

[octalgirl]

Well, obviously I remember those days! :)

Re:Some stories...

[octalgirl]

First, although the photos are in black&white and look pretty old, remember that those systems were still in heavy use right through the 80's and some even into the 90's before Y2K finally freaked everyone out enough to move on replacing them. Florida's election last year with a bunch of retired, poor eye sighted ppl trying to look at all those little chads on an 80-column punch card! My eyes hurt just thinking about it. (just a disclaimer so I don't age myself tooo much)

Anyway, one of my worst was the first time I did the old 'Del *.*' on the root of a PDP. I thought I was in my own directory. Good thing I was also responsible for the backups and restores. There was a team coming in to use the lab in a couple of hours so I had to run and grab the old reel tape and do a restore. I was so panicked but I made it. These were 24 hour shops because you didn't power this kind of equipment down, so I would always take the Thanksgiving shift (at triple pay) with a skeleton crew. We would bring in Turkey and champagne with everything else and party and feast all day. You could drink and smoke just about anywhere except for right next to the equipment. I remember a water sprinkler busting and flooding a lab, a fire another time that closed us up for two weeks. Counting in octal - ha! Does anyone ever do that anymore? Moving on, I remember using the Internet before there was a 'Web' to get to technical companies to look for know problems, issues. I remember using Kermit to dial into 3Com in the 286 days to get an updated driver - it took 2 days! Or how about stuffing Windows 3.1, WordPerfect 5.1, and a printer driver all on one bootable 31/2 disk? Boy, I could go on....

Unlike the steep competitive of today, those days were truly special. Great people, great times - the epitome of a true team spirit. To me it was a wondrous era, followed by yet another wondrous era that we have today, with desktop computing and the Internet - truly amazing stuff. That's why I get so miffed at groups like the RIAA and silly patents, and broadband ISPs whining about downloading and using bandwidth, about bad laws like the DMCA and elected officials and everyone just trying to jump on some bandwagon that they missed years ago. That's why I come here, so I can keep up to date on this crap and try and do something about it. I see technology on a precipice now. It can fall into the hands of greedy commercial corporations, or remain open and public so it can enter its next truly wondrous era.

For those wer nicht Deutsches sprechen

[Cheese Cracker]

The site ist here (german only).

Babelfish translation of the link above. There are some cool equipment a couple of clicks in.

Disappointed

[Cheese Cracker]

No pictures of 80-column punch cards... :(

Rhode Island Computer Society

[nutznboltz]

Don't let the bare directory format put you off--there are tons of neat things in that site, especially the big iron

We still use some of this!!

[FJ]

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.

Re: We still use some of this!!

[acoustix]

Its true. The US government still uses some of this equipement. I know for a fact that the IRS still uses the disk platters that you can remove from the machine and keep in a case. Crazy stuff!

Re:We still use some of this!!

[AppyPappy]

You can still buy 9-track tape systems for the desktop. They look like a briefcase. We used them for payroll at a previous job.

I know of companies that vaults of these tapes but no tape machines. What's the point of that?

Disk Farm

[AndroidCat]

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.

Re:Disk Farm

[Lucas Membrane]

aT 500 Mb, Those are 2311 type packs. They were obsolete by the time I got in the machine room in 1970. They were succeeded by 2314's, which could hold 14 Mb. Later, a dual density 2314 that could do 28 Mb came along.

Are we supposed to feel nostalgic?

[abhikhurana]

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.

Re:Are we supposed to feel nostalgic?

[Tony-A]

Seems like some of the best photographs currently in existence were taken in the Civil War (USA) era. Large glass negatives. Large!

A Lot of that stuff is still used today.

[jellomizer]

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.

Sphere

[GMontag451]

Wasn't Arthur Levine one of the characters in Michael Chrichton's "Sphere"?

AMD Press Release

[jmoriarty]

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.

Re:Photography Museum

[ninthwave]

Oops I be one of both. Sorry your site was just better than the site in the article though.

Re:Lab Rats

[octalgirl]

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'

Re: Spacewar

[nutznboltz]

click me

we do too

[prisoner]

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 ultimate

[YAN3D]

in GUI technology

eat your heart out Jef Raskin!!

Similar material on old IBM systems..

[scottme]

available at IBM Archive

maybe I am getting old

[werdnab]

I remember tape drives all too well. Wish I didn't.

Re:maybe I am getting old

[McFly69]

Your lucky, I still remember punch cards :( I wish I didn;t either... dam I am old!

just go to any federal IT center

[peter303]

If you want to see puch cards and 9-track tape drives.

The oldest working computer ?

[dargaud]

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...

Re:The oldest working computer ?

[dogfart]

Didn't 2600 have a contest to name the oldest computer connected to the Internet?

If so, who won?

Re:The oldest working computer ?

[shanksd1]

A reconstruction of Manchester's "Baby", the first stored program computer, which I believe contains original parts, runs on Thursdays at the Museum of Science and Industry.

If you accept this as "still working" and "in real use", then I think you'll be hard pushed to beat the Baby!

Re:The oldest working computer ?

[FatHogByTheAss]

The US Military was using this as late as 1994 for bolth NTDS and navigation. First units were delivered in 1958. God bless Seymore.

What is this stuff?

[Lucas Membrane]

The console does not look like a 360-era IBM machine, likely a previous generation. Is it 7070, 7007, 7094, 650, or what?

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.

reminds me of my house

[Servo]

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. :(

Re:Lab Rats

[gTsiros]

Do you realize you've just created dozens of potential stalkers?

except if you're married...

Re:are we there yet?

[PizzaFace]

I may be a bit behind the times, but did we ever hit that 1.5 ton bench mark?

You are behind the times. The 1.5 ton benchmark was a target toward which computers were descending.

Re:Some stories... I'll believe you

[Lucas Membrane]

Maybe. Obviously, a drum could have the advantage of being non-volatile, ie staying magnetized when someone pulls the big red switch. I never dealt with any of those systems that had to be very high availability, but I'd guess NASA did. I recall hearing that the airline systems would get rebooted 200 times per day. (So don't say that Windows hasn't matched the reliability of those old systems) This indicates that they had fairly fast ways to recover what needed to be recovered and get back up and running. A drum might have been the way to go for quick reboots long after it was obsoleted for main memory, which IIRC was pretty much all magnetic donuts at that time. The 370's (which came out at the end of 1970) had semiconductor memory in some models, but magnets in others.

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?

Batch processes, tape farms

[PizzaFace]

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.

Sarcasm

[StuartFreeman]

Imagine a beowulf cluster of those...

Dresscode

[adadun]

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?

Re:Dresscode

[gorilla]

In businesses, it was with the general trend towards casual gear in the office, started with casual Friday. When everyone in the business is wearing a suit and tie, the people in the computer room did too.

Re:#6 is a fraud!

[McFly69]

I think your silly. Everyone knows its the inside of my car 8-track player!


Amazingly, in picture #4, they are displaying my hot air toaster-ovens.

Speaking of old Computer equipment...OT of course.

[teamhasnoi]

Does anyone have the windows software for the good ol' Northgate Omnikey? I had it, but now can't find it anywhere. I've seen the dos version, and know how to remap it manually, but damn that takes forever if you're doing a lot of remaps and macros.

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

[Detritus]

I believe drums were used for paging store on some of the early VM systems.

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.

UNIVAC M642B

[Detritus]

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?

Great photos...

[cr0sh]

It almost seems like photos like this are a rarity - not only are we losing old data that is valuable due to advancing technology, we are also losing the hardware itself (most of it going to scrap yards/metal recycling - or ebay if it is lucky), as well as images of the machines.

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...

Obligatory Mel Moment...

[rmassa]

If anyone hasn't read it...

The story of Mel:
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/The-Story-o f-Mel.html

Another Resource

[WhiteChocolate42]

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).