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Old Computers Exhibit

Posted by michael on from the fanfold-paper dept.

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."

24 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. whoa by Morgahastu · · Score: 4, Funny

    a time when computer geeks looked respectable.

    1. Re:whoa by AndroidCat · · Score: 3, Funny

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

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  2. Too much MTV... by semaj · · Score: 4, Funny

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

    I worry sometimes, I really do. :-)

    --
    Meep meep
  3. The good old days.... by GnomeKing · · Score: 3, Funny

    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"...

  4. Real, Working Dinosaurs by NumbThumb · · Score: 4, Informative
    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.

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  5. Great days these were by Brother52 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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? ;)

  6. As someone born in 1980... by powerlinekid · · Score: 4, Funny

    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...

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  7. Really cool photos but no context by shoppa · · Score: 3, Insightful
    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?

  8. Re:Photography Museum by ninthwave · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  9. Re:What's especially funny by videodriverguy · · Score: 4, Informative

    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!).

  10. I'm appalled by panurge · · Score: 3, Funny
    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.)

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  11. It's true! by nutznboltz · · Score: 3, Interesting

    A Sun 15K only weighs 1.2 tons!

  12. Some stories... by powerlinekid · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Some stories... by bob · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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?

    2. Re:Some stories... by panurge · · Score: 3, Interesting
      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.

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    3. Re:Some stories... by octalgirl · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  13. We still use some of this!! by FJ · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  14. Are we supposed to feel nostalgic? by abhikhurana · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    --
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  15. Re:What's especially funny by AppyPappy · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

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  16. Re:Lab Rats by octalgirl · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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'

  17. What is this stuff? by Lucas+Membrane · · Score: 4, Informative
    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.

  18. Re:The oldest working computer ? by shanksd1 · · Score: 3, Informative
    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!

  19. Obligatory Mel Moment... by rmassa · · Score: 3, Funny

    If anyone hasn't read it...

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

  20. Another Resource by WhiteChocolate42 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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).