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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."
are pretty impressive. It is amazing how much smaller and faster the equipment has become. What is alarming is the rate at which the raw materials are being pulled from the Earth then discarded, usually right after the two year contract expires.
[http://it-tastes-so-good.blogspot.com] Are you hungry?
" The Enigma machine was used during world War Two - it gives more than a trillion possible combinations for a single number, making it impossible to decrypt letters encoded with the Enigma. The big silver piece next to it is a part of the Colossus - a British code-breaking computer."
The writer obviously doesn't know what he's talking about and didn't bother to read any text associated with that display, if he thinks Enigma was unbreakable. Especially since the parts of Colossus were specifically for breaking Enigma. Further, "more than a trillion" is a ludicrously imprecise figure, why couldn't he at least look up a more accurate figure (10^23 according to Wikipedia)?
The sad thing about the Computer Museum is that almost nothing there works. The Difference Engine replica is about it, and that's entirely mechanical. Some people tried to restore an IBM 1620 back in 1999, but they never got it working.
It's almost the last computer museum, too. The ones in Boston, San Diego, and Germany went bust. There's one still open in Bozeman, Montana. There are a few others which are just stuff in storage. That's about it.
The history of this field disappears very fast.
Where the heck is the "-1: Pedantic" button when you need it?
you can't open the same file twice on a mac.
... would be used if all computers were still that big!
Hands up if you would actually consider using a graphical interface without a task bar
You mean 'hand up if you'd consider using Mac OS X or one of the many *NIX environments that doesn't try to copy Windows?'
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