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50 Year Old Computer Still Going
The Angry Mick writes "Geek.com is running a blurb on a 50 year old CSIRAC computer that is apparently still functional, if lurking in an Australian museum. Sporting a whopping 2K of RAM and screaming along at a blistering 300 khz(!) it proves the adage that they really don't make 'em like they used to . . ." Yes, because if they did, they'd be really, really slow.
.. how do they cool that thing down?
I fuse with Mercer every single day...
...30 more years and my Apple //e will have been running for 50 years! Woohoo!
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
Im sure the old spectrums ran at 14khz..... can anybody confirm?
I find the idea of a massive computer lurking rather funny. Of course, it could be the 4 Guinesses I just polished off. Oh well, time for bed. I hope I don't have dreams of ENIAC or some other thing now!
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
A Beowuld cluster of- oh never mind, where would you fit it?
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized anymore.
Yeah, I was unable to log in or view the poll results for a while. Maybe it's some strange static page they put up during patching or updating. Anyone know for sure?
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
it was already said on this article
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
It is fixed now, but this is not the place to post this. They have bugtracking for that (click bugs on the left)
Linux hosting for $2.50/mo
Interesting, coming just after the "they don't make them like they used to" post about consumer electronics...
Reminds me of Space Cowboys a bit. Is this computer controlling a space based atomic bomb launcher too?
and linking that to yesterday's discussion about the lack of quality these days, i bet we won't have any/many of today's computers around in another 50 years time... or 50 days for some of them...
- Welcome the coming of the New World Odour
By reading the horde of nested articles, I got the impression that the machine hasn't run in decades, and probably would not if powered.
Correct me if I'm wrong. But please quote a piece that says it is actually running now.
Bot Assisted Blogging
"Yes, because if they did, they'd be really, really slow." Thank you Mr. Obvious
The human condition is to not accept the human condition.
It's:
...
Hz
kHz
MHz
GHz
original file where Geek.com got it from.
Linux hosting for $2.50/mo
Although I have the advantage of having a whopping 64k of ROM. I only have to use the RAM for my data. I would expect that computer also has to store the program binary in the 2k. Overlays, anyone?
Lately I've been finding it worth my time to spend a few hours recoding some functions in order to shave just a few bytes off their stack usage.
Kids these days, assuming everyone's got 128 megabytes for their application. They just don't code 'em like they used to.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
My first computer, the C64 runs at a massive 1Mhz, only about 3 times faster than this machine.
:)
Commodore released the 64 in 1982, this puts it at 20 years of age. That's 30 years between these two machines. When did Moore make that law again?
Yikes, imagine what the computer world will be like in 30 years time! Assuming MS haven't screwed it up for everyone.
Not bad for a living dinosaur. Listen to it yourself :)
Try doing 300,000 calculations per second in your head. I dare you.
My wife, on the other hand, has heard quite enough of them from me.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
It does annoy me that people , even though its in good humour , snigger at these old machines with their "paltry" 2K memory and slow speed. Yeah , sure they're not exactly a Cray. But look at what was done with this one. Skyscraper design , cloud droplet simulation, antenna design! Lets see even the best programmers used to point and drool GUI interfaces and hand holding wizards try and do that in 2K now using little more than paper tape! The people who designed, built and programmed these machines REALLY knew what they were doing and probably forgot more about efficient programming and code compression than todays "top" coders ever knew in the first place.
Now that Beowulf Clusters are commonplace, heck, even my kid sister is running a sweet 1000-noder, isn't this just too little and too late?
For example, a cluster of a million XT's can be had for chump-change, (heck, people pay you to take them away!) and can roundly spank this pathetic offering in raw horsepower.
It's a little know fact that the average american household throws away several hundred PC XT's (or the equivalent) every week!
Isn't it time we leveraged this awesome resource?
Is hard to imagine that this Computer was used for weather prediction. ...
Those tasks usually require large amounts of data to be processed
--
Stefan
DevCounter
An open, free & independent developer pool
created to help developers find other developers, help,
testers and new project members.
- Don't older computers than this run air traffic systems in airports?
- Is it Y2K compliant?
- And last and least, imagine a Beowolf cluster of these.
And BTW, at the link mentioned, they are questioning whether the computer is even running: "From what I read in the links the computer would definitely not work if powered, instead it would probably catch fire".Sex - Find It
god I feel old...
Years ago, when I worked at the CSIRO I worked on this machine for a while. I'm amazed it didn't die long ago. It used RPN for calculations, which takes getting used to, but is far better then algerbraic.
It's processor (not CPU - it consisted of multiple chips) is a hardware FORTH type. The jokes about FORTH programmers are true!
Just imagine how big a computational problem could be solved in 50 years with contemporary P4 hardware, if only Intel would build its hardware to last 50 years. ...Or anything over 5 years - for that matter...
Now this may not be a problem for home users that buy a complete new system every two-three years (regardless of environmental effects), but I'm sure happy they don't sent out space probes which rely on today's state-of-art.
--
The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in: we're computer professionals, we cause accidents -- Nathaniel Borenstein
Yes, because if they did, they'd be really, really slow.
Actually this wouldn't be so bad!
The speed of processors have incresased a LOT lately, but seemingly at the price of reliability. I don't need a 3Ghz processor, few people do! I'd love to see them take time to make there current processors much more reliable and cooler.
Surely it must be getting close to the end of "Hello World!" by this stage...
I'm not very good at making decisions... Or am I?
"A lot of its components would not stand having voltages applied to them again," says Thorne. "I think it would probably catch fire."
Reminds me of some of the old linux kernel code, and thinking its good to have a sense of humor.
Trying to get a printer working and getting a kernel message saying Lpt:1 on fire!
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
- Sporting a whopping 2K of RAM and screaming along at a blistering 300 khz(!)
At that speed one could sniff the data with a simple old LW/MW radio.
I just hope the feds won't arrest Aunt Mary for having a hacking/terrorist device in her kitchen.
" Sadly, it's not an option to make CSIRAC operational again today. Time has taken a toll on this fragile dinosaur.
So what exactly would happen if anyone tried to relive the magic by switching it on?
"A lot of its components would not stand having voltages applied to them again," says Thorne. "I think it would probably catch fire."
300kHz may not sound like much, but with overclocking and a decent watercooling setup you could crank it as high as 334kHz!
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
The Geek.com article says:
" A half-century old computer, called CSIRAC, is still operating in Australia. The computer, which was Australia's first, ran at a blistering 300 kilohertz, had 2 KB RAM, and 2.5 KB storage."
But the Inquirer article linked by the above Geek.com article says:
"The machine was the fourth computer to be built anywhere in the world, ran at 0.001MHz, and had a massive 2000 bytes of memory and a behemothic 2500 bytes of storage."
Which, by my calcuations, would be 1000 hertz or 1 kilohertz. I tend to believe the Inquirer, since they're running the source article. And besides, the 1977 Apple ][ was only 1 MHz, Don't you think there was a bit more progress than less than doubling in processor speed from 1949 to 1977?
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized anymore.
My first computer (10yrs or more) was a 386 with a 5quater drive and a 100mb hdd, 640k ram and no mouse. Windows 3.1 was going to happen. Yah, it all sounds funny now, but with the recent remark that Moore's law may soon become obsolete, we may not get MUCH faster computers on current technology. I guess we'll have different architectured.... quantum computing and DNA computing seem to be hot areas. :p
A question though, was it just built 50 yrs back, or has it had an up-time of 50yrs ?????
|/________
|\A|ALYS|
2K of RAM would be very useful (I got 640 bytes). Although direct access ROM is very nice (better than talking through a serial port anyway), having extra RAM would be lovely, letting you compress stuff better, and mix data by category instead of by whether or not it changes.
It's not just that the simpler chips are more reliable, but they use less power, generate less heat, cost less and take up less space and don't weigh as much.
I have heard that the ARM chip is the most popular for embedded applications these days, and many of the ARM chips in use are quite tiny, have no cache and run in the 40 Mhz range, like the ARM7TDMI.
68000-based chips from Motorola are also very popular.
And check out uCLinux, a linux port to several microprocessors that run without a memory management unit.
Why bother with an MMU when there's no disk to swap to, and the failure of a user program would mean the failure of the whole system?
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Check out this page which tells us the history of the said computer. In the end, it says the following:
Following the University of Melbourne's purchase in 1964 of a Control Data 3200 from the USA, CSIRAC was donated to the Museum of Victoria. At this time it was realised that CSIRAC was the oldest computer still in operation, and worthy of preservation so it was carefully dismantled and stored.
CSIRAC is now the centre-piece of the IT display at the Museum in Melbourne.
By "Type B Mac User" logic, a machine that is 50 years old is actually the best computer in the entire world.* Sorry guys, but your machines just cant compete - it's 50 years old, and it's STILL running. Flawless logic.
*Type A Mac User: "My computer is better than yours because it's a different colour"
*Type B Mac user: "My computer is better than yours because it's older"
As I understand it, the music was recorded by building a replica of the sound hardware and connecting it to the emulator. People who heard the music have confirmed it sounds pretty much like the original in 1955 (IIRC, it was around that time).
Perhaps the coolest thing that they did with CSIRAC was build a HLL and compiler for it, which they called Autocoder IIRC. It looked like a cross between FORTRAN and BASIC and avoided some of the thinkos of FORTRAN, as far as I could tell.
CSIRAC is now permanently on display at the museum in Melbourne, Australia. It's the only complete, original machine of its generation in existence, and well worth a look if you come down our way. There is also a book on CSIRAC called "The Last of the first", which is a fascinating read if you can get your hands on a copy.
One of my university lecturers, Peter Thorne, got his start in computers as an operator for the machine. He met his wife there - she was a fellow computer operator!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
>> they really don't make 'em like they used to . . ." Yes, because if they did, they'd be really, really slow.
Only in your dreams, honey.
Im not that old to have known *that* machine, but the "aura" that they had some 30 years ago was something like Physics today.
Computers we have now are "business machines", they must be cost-oriented, performance has to be just enough and, most importantly, they have to yield as much profit as possible to makers (read "marketing hype").
Not so in those old times: they were built to "boldly go", do things nobody ever thought of and cost a *royal lot of money* -- that was just hardware costs, software was a non-issue.
In fact, there are real fast computers today, but:
- until we get widespread usage of those quantum things, its nothing new under the sun to me and
- more or less like supercomputers were 50 years ago, they still are linked to military use (i.e. war!) and so, kept in low-profile (of course, this might even be a Good Thing, considering how many fanatics we have around -- rich and poor).
Moore's Law includes price. Did you take into account, that you might have payed less when purchasing your 1982 C64 than was spent on CSIRAC, 20 years earlier?
Btw, C64's feature 64kB which is 32 times 2kB, so at least memory size doubled five times in 20 years, that is: it doubled every four years.
--
In theory there is no difference between practice and theory. But in practice there is -- Jan L.A. van Snepscheut
The story states that it is still operational. If you follow the links, at the end of the the big write-up they ask a what would happen if someone tried to power it up. The reply was "probably catch fire".
I'll refer people to this story when they whine about their new, broken computers.
Brodie
"It's because you're running Windows."
"What do you mean?"
"You can run other operating systems on there."
"What's an operating system?"
(sigh) "Just follow the damn link."
Of course, by 1962 CSIRAC was years behind the state of the art.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
running the search engine on Sourceforge, right?
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
The actual hardware is dead, but as I've said elsewhere an emulator does exist and many of the old programs have been recorded.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Who's there?
*60 second pause....*
CSIRAC!
On one occasion, they gave a demo to an organisation called the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE), but apparently a memory error occurred and the thing printed "CSIRAC welcomes the members of the IRA) :)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
For those of you who didnt read the article pointed by the parent poster before listening, that is NOT music being played by the CSIRAC itself but rather a software recreation of the original hardware, and a modern recreation of the original speaker. :)
It basically sounds like my old spectrum, only a bit worse
I wonder what all the background noise on it is, though, it certainly sounded like they had a massive computer in the room while playing it.
I'm not doubting the authenticity of the story, but it must have taken some detective work to get that machine going. When I was at the University of Sydney, there used to be a bit of CSIRAC on display in the foyer of the Computer Science building.
I bet NetBsd runs on it :)
Reminds me of my Dad programming some old mainframe in COBOL (wasting a day of time) just so the logout screen would blink and beep the terminal beeper to a rhythm popular at football (soccer) matches. He had to get the timing just right using lowlevel interrupts and differing timers on 3 different workstation types. Lol.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
Those specs sound like Dell's latest £999 PC.
2 huge, throbbing k's of pr0n goodness :)~
I quoted the geek,com article:
"ran at a blistering 300 kilohertz"
Then I said:
"Apple ][ was only 1 MHz"
And, in reference to the above two:
"less than doubling in processor speed"
Sorry, somehow when I was typing, I was thinking of the CSIRAC's quoted speed as 600 kHz rather than the 300 kHz I would have see if I'd only looked up about an inch and a half.
Still just over tripling processor speed in nearly 30 years seems a pretty amazing lack of progress -especially when you consider that you're comparing a an IC transistor based machine to one running on vacuum tubes.
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized anymore.
Really? Which Moore's law included price?
_The_ Moore who the misnomer "Moores Law" was named after only made an observation while working at Intel about number of transistors/density in processors/chips over time. The rest is uneducated technobabble.
Price... Next thing you know it'll be bastardized to mean something about performance too. Oh wait...
One of my neighbours helped to build CSIRAC. My guess is the computer looks better than he does.
Great old guy. His wife does a great pumpkin scone.
To be honest, I haven't read the article, but the consensus here is that 50 years ago, technology was not in the state that "2k RAM" was an option. The same goes for 300KHz.
Both figures would fit into "early sixties", or 40 years ago.
Roger.
we have a working IBM 1130 here (and the IBM engineer that it was assigned to...) hehe
www.aconit.org
The CSIRAC was a vacuum tube based machine. From http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/csirac/design.html:
And on top of that, ICs weren't invented until 1958.
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized anymore.
References: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/534645.stm
The new stories are a little misleading - it certainly wasn't working when the museum got it.
Quick, someone preserve this for posterity... the editor's comment was not only relevant, grammatically correct, and spelled properly, but also funny!
I browse Slashdot at +3, Funny
Yeah, but imagine a Beowulf cluster of Beowulf cluster jokes.
Sporting a whopping 2K of RAM and screaming along at a blistering 300 khz(!)
300 kHz. Wow. I can do calculations in my head faster than that.
You have to remember, the Apple ][ was a microprocessor based system with an architecture that was integrated into a very tiny box (in comparison). Computer of 50+ years ago used these things called vacuum tubes. These systems also required constant maint.
If you would have said "microprocessor" to some of the designers, they would have replied with a "micro what?"
Personally I don't care how slow it was, I would absolutly love the chance to see the system in person. I've only walked through replicas. (Ya can't 'walk' through an Apple ][)
> they really don't make [computers] like they used to
If automobiles had evolved at the same rate as computers we would all be driving Jaguars that went 250 miles an hour, got 500 miles per gallon, cost $1000, and self-destructed once a year, killing all of the occupants.
Must be running their web server too.
The coolest voice ever.
Museum Victoria CSIRAC Infosheet
Guide to the Records of CSIRAC
Unless we're specifically talking about the moon-landing thing which in Soviet Russia would probably get the editor shot :P
I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
I bet Windows mysteriously loaded up just as fast on that computer.
That's true. According to the book I've got, the CPU of CSIRAC was synchronized to the mercury delay lines, which completed a cycle in about 1 millisecond, so I suppose you could call the clock rate 1 kHz. Each instruction took either 2, 3, or 4 memory cycles to execute (the initial design had every instruction take 4 cycles, but an improved control unit design took advantage of cases where that wasn't necessary). Hence, the machine ran at about 500 instructions per second.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Let's see, 50 years at 300 kHz is like 5 years at 3 MHz, and 180 days at 30 MHZ, and 3 days at 2 GHz... hmm. "A sundial in Egypt has been keeping time for 5000 years -- collecting and using it's own power." A neat story, just not an impressive one.
It says "typical" not "state of the art". Most desktop PCs *ARE* around 500Mhz and *DO* have only 64mb of RAM.
The article is clearly dated "Dec 10 2002" so it's not "from around a year ago" at all - no idea where you got that from.
Nick...
The C64 was a CONSUMER item. When the CSIRAC was built there was no such thing as a computer for consumers. It would be more appropriate to compare the CSIRAC to the so-called supercomputers that were availiable in 1982. Machines like the Cray X-MP and Cyber 205 were availiable in 1982. The costs to own and operate them are comparable to what it took to operate the CSIRAC in it's day.
i ca l/computers/history.html
The UK's weather bureau give specs on the Cyber 205 they were using in '82:
http://www.met-office.gov.uk/research/nwp/numer
CDC Cyber 205
200Mhz Clock
1 MegaWord of memory
The Cyber had a 64 bit word size so that amounted to 8 MB of ram. So clockspeed has increased over 600 times and memory has increased over 4000 times in that time frame. This is just confining myself to the 205. I didn't look for the specs on other large machines like the Crays that were availiable then.
Computers as something just anyone could play with were pretty much nonexistant prior to 77 (true you could build something ENIAC-like anytime in the seventies if you were REALLY good with electronics). It's more instructive to see what the kind of money they had to spend on the CSIRAC will get you as time moves forward. Power comparable to the C64 was availiabe in the early sixties for that kind of money.
The technical illiteracy in this article (and these posts) makes me ill. Nobody, including the source article, is speaking at the proper measure of precision and accuracy needed for a technical conversation.
It's crap like this that makes me realize why my career is so riddled with bursting bubbles, flakey products, and security concerns.
Someday soon the "software enginner" is going to be looked at like ambulance chasing lawyers - slimey, incompetent, and overpaid.
God, I need a new career.
Okay, some quick math:
50 years * 366 days/year (rounding up) * 24 hours/day * 60 minutes/hour * 60 seconds/minute * 300000 cycles/second = 4.74336e14 cycles
Now, my Athlon XP 1600:
4.47336e14 cycles / 1400000000 Hz / 60 sec / 60 min = Roughly 89 hours
So even if this machine were still running (which, incidentally, it's not. RTFA), in terms of pure cycles of functionality pulled out of the machine, my Athlon beat it in the first four days. It's a lot easier to maintain a pair of shoes than it is an airplane. And of course, this machine ISN'T still running, and would likely execute an HCF instruction (Halt and Catch Fire) if powered on, so you really can't call it reliable.
(Of course, my Athlon's running Windows (needed a games machine), so it's debatable whether or not these cycles have actually been functional...)
--AC
Why bother with an MMU when there's no disk to swap to, and the failure of a user program would mean the failure of the whole system?
Fault tolerance perhaps? Instead of having to locally hit a reset button, someone can remotely restart the system.
I control the time!
This guy's dead on - somebody mod this up please!!!
I would have thought many of them would no longer be manufactured. (Computers went solid state- discrete transistors- in the late 1950s and integrated circuits in the early 1970s.)
"Which, by my calcuations, would be 1000 hertz or 1 kilohertz. "
With a clockspeed of 1000 hertz you'd actually be able to hear the thing go "OOOOOOOUUUUUOOOOUOOUUUUOOOOOUUUOUOUOOOOOO".
Man that !has! to have sucked completely to be a developer back then: "WATCHA SAYIN'?? I GOTTA WHAT??? CHANGE THE POINTER?? I !CAN'T! !HEAR! YA!!"
naah sig schmig
has the same hard disk size/RAM amount proportions... just imagine... ...had 2 KB RAM, and 2.5 KB storage...
That's 4/5 as much RAM as drive space! A computer with a 40GB hard drive would have 32 GB of RAM!! Kick it up to a 120 GB drive and you've got an insane 96GB RAM!!!
Wow.
Computer evolution and Windows de-evolution are separate issues.
--
If you moderate this, then your children will be next.
Here's a brief page about some ibm tube logic modules, schematic for an 'inverter', etc. Anybody with an old 650 laying around I'll gladly cart it off for you.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Uh ... since semiconductor cost is directly proportional to size, increasing the density reduces the cost for a die with the same circuits. Likewise, increasing the density also allows you to put more circuits on the same die and to run them at higher speeds, increasing performance. Moore was most defnitely talking about price and performance in his "law", he was just not spelling out every little detail for you.
does it do Ogg Vorbis? //e or the other one.
Either, your
> Computer evolution and Windows de-evolution
> are separate issues.
Oh, you're right, I forgot that using Linux keeps your hard drives from failing, forces everybody to perform daily backups, keeps worms and viruses from affecting your system, makes CPU fans last forever...
It's just about to output the result of it's program, but it doesn't think you're going to like it:
Fourty-two.
The problem was that you didn't really know what the question was.
Thank you Mr. Adams.
A few things that should be considered along with the lifetime of current PC's
a) Heat and dissipation: They run hot as hell. Yeah, this was filled with Vacuum tubes and probably got fairly warm as wellone probably got fairly warm as well, but in modern PC's the heat tends to be focussed over particular components, leading to detioration over time.
b) Moving parts: Fast-spinning hard drives, fans (see heat, above), etc. The more moving parts you have the greater chance of failure. It also takes more power impulses to start a motor spinning up (hard drive, CD-ROM).
c) Expected time of usage: We're going through PC's a lot faster than we used to. How long was CSIRAC in use? For most home users, you can usually expect an upgrade at least every 5 years. Perhaps not a new PC, but at least a component. Why build a PC that's going to last forever if it's going to be obsolete very soon - except for consideration to servers, etc.
All of the programs will be still under copyright for at least 25 more years.
A computer with 256 MB of ram would have 320 MB of hard drive space. This is a bit less impressive. If you want to try it I know a guy who still has a working 300 MB hard drive.
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
Does it have the new Hyper-Threading Technology?
n g. htm?iid=ipp_dlc_procp4p+body_intro_ht&
http://www.intel.com/homepage/land/hyperthreadi
(You can look at it online if you want)
Sadly enough, yes.
It wasn't major, really... just a Turing machine project for a homework assignment. It calculated the function y = 2x + 1. In unary, of course.
Strangely enough, writing Turing machines didn't greatly increase my appreciation of 0s. My appreciation for having an instruction decoder, however, went through the roof.
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
I'm sure it would power up in the morning and clear its throat for about five hours, then go in the bathroom for two, then have salt on its oatmeal.
And all the while, there's a Sun machine thinking "Why can't you just short?! Short and be done with it!"
I'm having an episode!
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
Which is why the RIAA shut it down in the first place.
Has somebody told the NetBSD folks about this one? (Read 2nd line from the top center of the link if you don't get it.)
There will be a celebration to jointly celebrate it's 50th anniversary and it's completion of calculating pi to the 4th digit.
There is something I find annoying with Slashdot, it's the bad habit of posters to leech news from other sites that already refer to a previous coverage on another site. This is absurd: I click on Slashdot's link to go to geek.com's link, which sends me to The Inquirer, from which I can finally have the real thing. Is this only me that is irritated or what? Hey, when I read the same news first on OSNews (who at least have the decency to redirect to original sources more often) and that some hours after I see that same story on Slashdot, but with the link pointing to OSNews, I find that a bit ridiculous. Not that I think it wrong to acknowledge that news posted on Slashdot came from another news aggregator (that's how one learns about the other ones), but the point is that you end up with a neverending arab telephone, and the guy down the line says black when you're posting white. Or else it's a new way to counter the slashdot effect, and I'm not just getting it.
the article mentions IBM's digital computer in america,
but doesn't mention that the first digital computer (the 'ZI') was designed in germany by: KONRAD ZUSE:
Konrad Zuse - Mark I
It's a tube computer, so it HAS to sound better then a solid state one.
Where can I go to buy one of these. I need to heat by back alley. I'll strech the power from the warehouse, nice and toasty cardboard box.
...is to combine the best ideas from old and new technology alike, and blend them into an entirely new result. That, to my eyes, is what real "innovation" or R&D is all about.
Some examples: DEC (Digital Equipment), in their heyday, came up with some great techniques for memory management at the hardware level. I'd be curious to know how many of those ideas got rolled over into more current stuff.
Another one; Where would we all be if Xerox's PARC facility had never come up with what has morphed into today's electronic rodent? Heck, IBM was using light pens years before that.
In short; You don't want to just ignore something because it's "old" or "obsolete" (Essence, I loathe that word!). You need to take the good ideas from the old stuff and build on them.
Somehow, I doubt that we would have so many tons of electronic junk choking landfills today if computer and electronics hardware was (a), really built to last, like the old stuff was; And (b), built to be easily upgradeable.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
...just my 2 gil.
According to my calculations, if you were to port Unreal Tournament to this machine, you would be able to get 1 frame every ten days!
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Here's a photo
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Well, yes, if they did apply it slowly, if the only electrolytics were dry-type. However, it probably has a few de-volitized (dried or leaked) wax electrolytics as well; those and filament and HV transformers are both highly likely to not only give magic smoke but even flame at full voltage. If you ramp those, you may smell smoke before seeing fire.
bill/n1vux
considering that enineers knew what was up back then. They didn't try to cram even more penis enlarging half assed circets into the same wafer NO they added GASP another wafer. They knew their wafers had imperfections (silicon can be argued as a isotope of carbon and both make crystals quite readely, cristals have fisure lines etc.)Thier equipment (nastalgia aside) was much hardier because: A it was significantly thicker,b it ran at SANE vibrating frequencies (indeed if it vibrated at all) B: didn't have slas *we're all small penised 14 year old men* dot dot ohrgs
Now worship these people, they'll make their bitch twice any day of the week and 4 times on sunday.
What version of windows does it run?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
that is the word that the modern IT industry does not know anything about. That is why you get more and more bloat that takes up more and more space, speed and throughput yet really don't end up with that much more functionality. In fact, what you usually get is more problems leading to more expensive and extensive fixes as well as less reliability and more complexity (needless complexity). So while 300kHz is mighty slow by today's comparisons just look at how todays computers are brought to their knees just for basic operating requirements (as in that crapware OS produced by MS)
Imageine a beowulf cluster of these, then imagine my pocket calculator kicking its ass.
1. Fifty-Year-Old Computer Being Restored
I guess Geek.Com is behind ;-)
2. The first Transistor computer, TX-0, was restored to demonstratable condition in the 1980's by The Computer Museum. Yes it worked again, No question; as an original member and early volunteer of TCM (before the first tmove), I was there, and saw it run.
TCM was once of Boston, then of Marlboro, now of SilliValley. See the TCM Project Description and the Alumni page. It was built in 1957, so would be only 45 years old. I'm not sure what happened to it when DEC sold the building, or John McKenzie, who got it to work again. Shag Graetz's classic Creative Computing article on PDP-1 SpaceWar includes it's TX-0 predecessor. (and French translation) The TMRC pages include TX-0 history as well. See also Levy/Hackers
-- bill / n1vux
Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of THESE!!!
The one I read had (c) 2001 at the bottom of it... (The one I pulled that quote from) And all you moderators that think my post was trolling can bite my ass and then get a sense of humor.
I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
Great... now the RIAA is going to get into the time travel business and stop it where it all began.
running the doom3 leaked alpha version on one of those!
This story is where I got that idea from.
And I don't know where you come from, but 500mhz is NOT typical any more. After all why should it be when you can get a 1+ ghz barebones kit for under $300. At that price its not worth it _not_ to upgrade.
And mods... Give me a break, my original post was in no way trolling. I was stating a fact which the editors of slashdot failed to notice and then making a joke about it. Grow a sense of humor.
I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
Think about it. That 300 KHz computer may still be running after 50 years, but those 50 years of CPU time add up to about 43 hours of CPU time on a 3.06 GHz Pentium 4. And that's just clock cycles; the Pentium 4 probably gets far more instructions per clock cycle. And, of course, the on-chip cache on the Pentium 4 far exceeds the 2 KB of RAM on that 50-year-old machine.
All in all, today's fastest Pentium could easily exceed the lifetime processing power of the CSIRAC in just a few hours, at a tiny fraction of the cost. Sure, it's cool that the computer still runs after 50 years, but let's put it into perspective here -- we get far more computing power out of modern chips, even if they fail within a couple years! Longevity isn't everything...
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
RE: long-term reliability of tube gear...
It's a matter of numbers. Your cousin's Mesa Boogie guitar amp has maybe eight tubes. An old TV or a fancy old Collins ham rig contains maybe a couple dozen. If one or two blow their heaters, it's pretty easy to take a look and spot the ones that aren't lit up. An old mainframe with THOUSANDS of 12AX7's is quite another matter.
Engineers in the 1940's and 50's weren't stupid. They knew that the most common failure mode of a tube is the filament breaking from the thermal stress when it's turned on, just like a light bulb. So the first thing they did was to run the heaters at something lower than normal--maybe 9.5 volts for a nominal 12 volt rating. They'd also use relatively low plate voltages, since they were running the things in switching circuits and linearity and noise didn't matter.
Even with all that, the assumption was that tube mainframes weren't to be turned on and off very much. There was a guy who ran the computer center at the University of Washington in the early days, who saw an opportunity when they replaced their original IBM 709 mainframe with a solid-state 7094. He quit his job, bid on the old machine as surplus, leased a storefront (conveniently next door to a tavern) and set up one of Seattle's first independent computer job shops.
At one time they hired a pretty inexperienced kid to mind the machine in the evenings. The boss left him once to wait for some big accounting job to finish printing, telling him to "lock up" afterwards. Instead, the kid waited until the end of the job and TURNED EVERYTHING OFF. It took a couple of days of people crawling through the cabinets looking for and replacing blown tubes before the system was back in production.
I read somewhere else that the British government asked the CSIRO to discontinue any computing projects and focus on primary industry (in a time when Oz was alot more 'in bed' with the UK). Chalk that up as another great missed opportunity.. Who knows Silicon Valley could've been in Melbourne (v. unlikely tho!)..
Yeah it does suck. But you can improve matters a bit by manually setting the sizes of the Disk cache and virtual memory. I have 512 Meg with Win98SE and I can even disable VM and 99% of my programs will run happily - there was one game, can't remember which, that insisted on VM being enabled - seems silly - no matter how much RAM you have. Think it might've been Sacrifice. Oh yeah apparently if Disk Cache gets too big on a Win98 machine with more than 512 megs it can actually slow things down - but setting it to a fixed size manually seems to sort it.
The Linux kernel has support for a variety of hardware watchdog devices you can use on PC's.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
2kb is enough for anybody
13 year old white supremacists are shitty web designers.
I took some photos of CSIRAC while visiting the Melbourne Museum where it's now on display. They have a 2KB Casio electronic diary placed in the exhibit an example of a recent computer of the same power.
What is the inverse of the Matrix?
see subject
This might be worthwhile if you have to do lots of this type of work as the up front coding would be a fair bit of work. Ok maybe you wouldn't or shouldn't do this for debugging/maintainability purposes, or you have already thought of this and discarded it with good reason. write a function which takes an input (the key), calls the ROM and "decrypts" the called data into what you want - this would be further binary code. You first have to map the rom into usable chunks and allocate each chunk to the output you want. The hard bit is to write a decompression/decryption function which turns the 'garbage' from the rom into the code/data slab you want. Basically you need a program on a big(ger) machine in you have the outputs you want and all the rom data. Then this program creates a series of keys which basically identifies and decompresses the rom slabs into what you want. These decrypted/decompressed slabs would be further binary executables to extend the functionality of your embedded device (and easily larger than the 2k you can run) The big unanswered question is can you get the decompression/decryption function small enough to run on your embedded device? Is this what you meant by overlays? Am I an idiot for suggesting this?
You vastly underestimate how many Pentium 100's there are still running Windows 95 or even 3.11.
Most people have no need to upgrade to gigahertz machines. I'm a software developer for ASP.NET applications and my Celeron 450 does me fine (albeit with 256mb ram rather than 64). Other developers in our office use Celeron 300s and some of the sales guys who only use e-mail get away with a P200. It doesn't matter how cheap an upgrade is, if you don't need it, most people won't buy it.
Only games players bother upgrading state of the art machines every couple of months. Office users just stick with what works and gets the job done.
If you told most office people that their computer would be taken away and upgraded to a new one every 3 months they'd have a heart attack.
Nick...
I too am an ASP.NET developer and I feel sorry for ya man... VS.NET with only 450mhz would drive me batty.
I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
Hmmm, yes I forgot about those wax type caps, probably because it's been so long since I saw one (Heathkit HW-101 anyone?) but I would imagine the museum operators would understand this risk and check them out pretty well beforehand. This, of course, is assuming it has been stood un-powered for any length of time.
The transformers should have been pretty well made in the first place. This is, after all, a pretty heavy power consumer (but with a known power consumption hence all factors can be designed for unlike radio kit that the designers weren't able to factor all operating conditions of their output stages in all scenarios) and the windings will have been made with an eye to this. As a side-effect I would not expect to see and deterioration of the enamel in such high-quality components, especially of the type we tend to see in ham-grade kit. It probably hasn't been loaded up into an arbitrary length of wire at 2kW without a matching network, either... :o)
--... ...-- --- --
Resistance is futile. Reactance buggers it up.
BOFH excuse #216:
What office are you in? Oh, that one. Did you know that your building was built over the universities first nuclear research site? And wow, are'nt you the lucky one, your office is right over where the core is buried!
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