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Burying a Mainframe In Style
coondoggie writes "Some users have gone to great lengths to dispose of their mainframes but few have gone this far. On November 21, 2007, the University of Manitoba said goodbye to its beloved mainframe computer by holding a New Orleans-style jazz funeral for its 47-year-old IBM 650, Betelgeuse. In case you were wondering what an IBM 650's specifications were, according to this Columbia University site, the 650's CPU was 5ft by 3ft by 6ft and weighed 1,966 lbs, and rented for $3200 per month. The power unit was 5x3x6 and weighed 2,972 pounds. The card reader/punch weighed 1,295 pounds and rented for $550/month. The memory was a rotating magnetic drum with 2000-word capacity (10 digits and sign) and random access time of 2.496 ms. For an additional $1,500/month you could add magnetic core memory of 60 words with access time of .096ms. Big Blue sold some 2,000 of the mainframes, making it one of the first successfully mass-produced computers."
The Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology put the first Cray 1 sold in Sweden on display yesterday (18 Dec 2007). It has the serial number 9!
While not as old as the IBM machine, Cray always had a special aura of super-duper-power-ueber-performance to me. -
But how do you know this?
And do you think that you are not a machine and that you have feelings? And if so how do you know this?
How can you be so sure that the mathematical entities inside your beige box computer are not self-aware? How can you know that they don't scream when you shut the computer off and are not reborn when you grant them electrical current the next morning?
Do you really know that you are anything different than a little sim in a simulated world, or a self-aware mathematical entity in a mathematical universe?
You don't really know this for absolutely sure, do you? Then how can you claim so easily that something is only a machine and has no feelings when you don't even known whether you are a machine, and whether what you call your feelings are nothing more than simulated or mathematical constructs that you perceive as feelings?
This is one of the few times I miss being in college. I can't imagine the multi-national I now work for having enough of a sense of humor to retire a system like this.
The University of Manitoba is my alma mater and I have three separate thoughts about this: 1) This is the thing Telnet worked on?!? Oh dear lord! No wonder registering was hell! 2) This reeks of the engineers. Some how, some way. unbolting and turning all the seats backwards in an arts ampitheatre? Classic. 3) 25 desktops vs the mainframe. So they're going to add a couple more classrooms onto 5th floor?
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
This is my father's axe. I've replaced the blade twice and the handle three times, but it's still my father's axe.
Some more discussion about it here. It's also called the Ship of Theseus Paradox, which the discussion references.
There's a mention of Pratchett's Scone of Stone in "The Fifth Element." Is that what you're thinking of?