Slashdot Mirror
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.
A Beowuld cluster of- oh never mind, where would you fit it?
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized anymore.
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
Not bad for a living dinosaur. Listen to it yourself :)
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.
*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?
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
" 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.
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
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?)
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.
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.)
So might your Athlon, son... So might your Athlon.
That is all.