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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.
It's:
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Hz
kHz
MHz
GHz
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Not bad for a living dinosaur. Listen to it yourself :)
Is hard to imagine that this Computer was used for weather prediction. ...
Those tasks usually require large amounts of data to be processed
--
Stefan
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" 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."
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.
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?)
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".
The original source even says it cannot run.
It was the hairbrained TheInquirer article writer who somehow got the impression that it was still running.
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Someone's comment, your quote. It's actually more likely that if they were to power it up/were powering it up, they apply voltage gradually to allow the electrolytic capacitors to re-form and the getter rings/compounds in the thermionic devices to restore vacuum.
It's not unusual for thermionic equipment to survive long periods of time without use. There is still radio equipment from this era running strongly in museums and private collections and, dare I say, in everyday use. The odd capacitor may fail short once in a while, resistors may fail _high_ (they gradually increase resistance with time - a knownphenomenon) or valves/tubes may lose a heater or go "soft" but I think it's stretching the imagination somewhat to expect it to burst into flames.
Incidentally, designers from this era often made their chassis live (high potential with respect to ground) so the only thing I'd expect to catch fire would be the young PFY geek leaning on it to get a better view of the thermionics powering up and starting to glow...;o)
Resistance is futile. Reactance buggers it up.
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 sold a few programs for the beast on 2KB EPROMS. There can be quite much stuff in 2K. (for example an editor + assembler + disassembler). Once I added almost 500 bytes in a 2K program, and optimized it back into a 2K chip. Talk of ugly coding, used all the tricks I knew (reusing jump addresses for instructions, self-modifying code (written backwards in the rom to save a byte in copying it into ram), jumping into unrelated routines to reuse 4 bytes of the exit code, you name it. All done in pure hex... Man, those were the days...
In Murphy We Turst
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.
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
Here's a photo