Big, Beautiful Boxes From Computer History

Slatterz writes "We might sometimes complain about the limitations of today's technology, but there's nothing like seeing photos of a 27Kg hard drive with a capacity of 5MB to put things into perspective. PC Authority has toured the Computer History Museum in California, and has posted these fascinating photos, including monster 27Kg and 60Kg drives, and a SAGE air-defense system. Each SAGE housed an A/N FSQ-7 computer, which had around 60,000 vacuum tubes. IBM constructed the hardware, and each computer occupied a huge amount of space. From its completion in 1954 it analyzed radar data in real-time, to provide a complete picture of US Airspace during the cold war. Other interesting photos and trivia include some giant early IBM disc platters, and pics of a curvaceous Cray-1 supercomputer, built in 1972. It was the fastest machine in the world until 1977 and an icon for decades. It cost a mere $6 million, and could perform at 160MFLOPS — which your phone can now comfortably manage."

Comments

5 meg @ 27 kilos

[acehole]

Going off of those standards, the thumbdrive sitting on my desk should weigh 22,118.4 kilos.

Double that because i've got two.

Re:This stuff is so cool

[Mr. Roadkill]

...until you plug it in, at which point you'd better pray you've got adequate cooling.

Kg?

[__aagctu1952]

including monster 27Kg and 60Kg drives

So can anyone explain to me what exactly a Kelvin gram is, and how it relates to hard drives? I'm guessing something to do with heat capacity...
Oh, you meant kilogram?
k = kilo
K = Kelvin
It's not rocket surgery, people. And it's something that should be caught by Slashdot's "editors" before it goes up on the main page.

Re:Kg?

[Anonymous Coward]

I kindly suggest you go get laid.

Re:Kg?

[tehcyder]

quit looking for petty little excuses to look like a fuckhead and look out of the window instead. see, it's pretty out there!

You do know you're posting on slashdot? We hate Windows.

* RIMSHOT *

Re:This stuff is so cool

[El Lobo]

I can imagine, 15 years from now, an article showing "Big beautiful boxes from the 2000s" a big "portable" Acer Aspire 5536G which a weight of 1,2 Kg inclusive batteries (wow, would some users from the future scream in awe) (Oh, I remember THAT one, comments another). Oh, look at that iPhone: you needed A POCKET to carry that thing!...

Oh well...

Re:The CDC 6600 console

[dbIII]

I see what you mean:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CDC_6600_console.JPG
I think on first sight I would have to fight the urge to back away slowly out of the room.

Re:This stuff is so cool

[Anonymous Coward]

The article is about a time when CPU cycles were more expensive than programmer time and text data took a lot of space.

That's about when I started -- punch cards and all. Maybe two or three turnarounds a day. Before sending a program in to run through the assembler, we were expected to sit there and "play computer", going through all the operations of all paths through the programs before "wasting time" on the big iron.

Mind you, this was in the afternoon. The mornings were spent cutting down redwood trees, tapping rubber trees and mining graphite, copper and zinc so we could fabricate our own pencils for the afternoon's work. The real hotshots didn't make programming mistakes, so they could skip tapping the rubber trees for use in making pencil erasers.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:What kind of dumbass captions are these?

[Plunky]

Just dangle a caret in front of them what have you got to loose?

Re:This stuff is so cool

[Anonymous Coward]

The UI itself hasn't got significantly better since Windows 95

Windows 95 == Mac 85!

Re:What kind of dumbass captions are these?

[mcgrew]

Ann ewe no your write, two. Owl wise ewes a spill chucker!