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.

Comments

built to last

[nath_o_brien]

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...

Re:That has more ram than my present CPU has

[ottffssent]

*laugh*

I don't even notice unless an app is using over 100M (technically, 100,000KB, but who's counting?)

But it sure would be nice if Windows would notice I have gobs of RAM lying around and start using it for something productive like caching the disk subsystem, rather than the other way around. There is no excuse for a system with >512M of free RAM paging to disk! What ass-backwards VM got stuck into Windows, anyway?

I have used this machine!

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:These computers are not to be laughed at

[TummyX]

"Bloatware" does exist, but not all large programs are bloatware.

Would you call Quicksort "bloatware" because it uses more stack space than bubblesort?

The increase in size (both code and memory foorprint) of applications is usually accompanied by better reuse, extensibility, portability and speed (better algorithms).

I doubt the programs you had to hand code in asm for a 2kb machine could be extended very easily.

Today, we have so much memory and CPU power that we can 'waste' it on stuff like Java, COM, XML etc to make programming reusable components easier.

is that 50 dog years?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

how do you replace vacuum tubes?

[peter303]

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.)

This is so lazy

[MHV]

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.

Had that thing been running...

[Muad'Dave]

continuously for the past 50 years, it would've performed 4.734e14 instructions. Your newfangled 3.3GHz processor performs that many instructions in 39.85 HOURS.

efficiency

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

More CSIRAC Photos

[allrong]

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.