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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."
This stuff is so cool!!
Although these photos don't include the functional replica of Babbage's Difference Engine #2 that's currently at the museum, and leaves in a few months. I was just at the museum two weeks ago. It was pretty interesting. There's also an exhibit about the history of chess computation. Apart from those two things though, most of the museum is a big room full of old computers. I wish there were more to see there, but what is there is pretty interesting. I recommend going before the Babbage Engine leaves in a few months if one gets a chance.
I love BBW errr I mean BBB.
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)?
Magnetic core memory came in a range of sizes. It replaced vacuum tubes entirely by about 1960, and was extremely cheap to produce - from $1 per bit initially, to 1c per bit by the mid-60s.
Crazy, but in those days, no one ever used more than 640 bits of memory. True story.
Direct link to photograph, in case you want to see a range of core memories, which, incidentally were great because they didn't lose their values in a power outage:
http://www.pcauthority.com.au/Gallery/153867,computer-history-museum-photo-gallery-weird-fascinating-photos-including-a-giant-cray-and-a-60kg-hard-drive.aspx/40
Qxe4
Going off of those standards, the thumbdrive sitting on my desk should weigh 22,118.4 kilos.
Double that because i've got two.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
Third photo has an ominous misspelling. They can't even spell computers correctly in the caption.
Here was an interesting one, an old PC with a monitor in portrait format. It asks why they didn't catch on, and I'm not sure I know the answer. It seems like it WOULD be better, especially because you could look at an entire page on the thing. Now with 21 inch monitors I can do that anyway, but what was it that caused our landscape monitors to become standardized like they are?
Also, check out the keyboard on this beast! Not QUERTY. Not DVORAK. Who thought that would be a good idea?
Qxe4
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.
Panties Stink!
They really, really stink!
Sometimes they're red, sometimes they're green,
Sometimes they're white or black or pink
Sometimes they're satin, sometimes they're lace
Sometimes they're cotton and soak up stains
But at the end of the day, it really makes you think
Wooooooo-wheeeee! Panties stink!
Sometimes they're on the bathroom floor
Your girlfriend- what a whore!
Sometimes they're warm and wet and raw
From beneath the skirt of your mother-in-law
Brownish stains from daily wear
A gusset full of pubic hair
Just make sure your nose is ready
For the tang of a sweat-soaked wedgie
In your hand a pair of drawers
With a funky feminine discharge
Give your nose a rest, fix yourself a drink
cause wooooooo-wheeeeeee! panties stink!
I recently read A Computer called Leo, which tells a story of post WW2 computer development in the UK.
The thing that stuck me most was the long cylinders of mercury used as memory, (mercury delay lines).
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.
The highlight and centrepiece of the Museum - The Babbage Engine. It's a replica, made in the British Museum using the original as a template.
This is not a replica of an original. The machine in the British museum was built by a team using Babbage's note. No original was ever built, as Babbage could not get funding for the project. The machine at the Computer History Museum (as pictured) is the second built by the same British Museum team who built the first.
If you want to see it, it will be at the CHM until December 2010, at which time it will be moved to the home of Nathan Myhrvold, the person who paid for its construction.
-Todd
Omne ignotum pro magnifico.
That CDC 6600 console with the two round screens must be the weirdest-looking real-life terminal device ever built! The whole thing looks like a robot face. I wonder what the screen resolution was...
That brings back a lot of memories. Back then, we used to put our desks on top of the computer.
Seeing that old gear is great. It's amazing the ingenuity used in the 40s and 50s.
My mother-in-law used to program a CDC, which always seems quite crazy as she can't even use SMS on her phone! Of course in those days doing punch cards was so tedious men didn't want the jobs. It would be interesting to compare the ratios of female:male programmers and correlate it with the improvement in tech over time.
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
When I was in high school, my computer class did a field trip to one of the sites. It was a two story building, with each floor the size of a department store and filled with aisles and aisle of racks filled with vacuum tube processing modules. The had disk had a drum the size of a small trash can. Even at the time (late 70's) the guy giving the tour said the computer could be replaced by one the size of a phone booth. These days, a few hundred of them could fit into something the size of a phone.
It is a tricky linguistic problem. This probably doesn't happen often, where the designer never gets to make one but someone makes long afterwards. It's not a replica in the conventional sense, but I don't know what other word would describe it better than that.
Is there any information on what this thing cost to make? Was it in the millions? several tens or hundreds of thousands?
Correct - but also note that it was the Science Museum in London that build the replica - not the British Museum (also in London). The British Museum houses collections of cultural artifact and history from around the globe (it's in Great Russell Street in the Bloomsbury area of London, and is well worth a visit if you ever get the chance). The Science Museum is in Cromwell Road in the Kensington area of London, and specialises, as you might guess, in the history of science and technology from the year dot to the present time - also well worth a visit.
I think I've seen one of those 27 kilo HDDs before. I volunteered at a local computer recycling program, and among many usable machines, they'd get old stuff that we were to dismantle, and separate into different kinds of materials for disposal. The one I saw was an IBM, and the outer housing for the HDD was roughly the shape and size of a washer or dryer. The host machine was similar but twice as long. It had an 8-inch floppy with what I think was some kind of auto-loader. I think, all told, it had hookups for THREE 220V circuits. (Two on the host, and one on the HDD) I wanted to get one of the drive platters for myself, but the best I could do was the 'Unit Emergency' killswitch off the host computer. (I had set aside the control panel from the host machine, but didn't have room to take it home that day, and someone tossed it.)
Also, holy crap. I never knew silicon wafers came from hugeass things of silicon like that, I always assumed they were made more or less in their final wafer form artificially from smaller pieces. o_O I guess it makes more sense that they're cut from massive homogeneous chunks of solid silicon.
I wish they had a better shot of the RCA tube memory. I've seen pictures of those before, the dies look cool in a vacuum tube like that. They look very intricate, like miniatures of space station solar panels or something, heh. (Like the die in an EPROM, but MUCH bigger)
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
Yeah, I programmed the SAGE in the late 50's. It did crazy stuff: Imaging talking to remote radars connected via a phone line? You're kidding, no? Modems the size of a small bus.
Got audio by monitoring the 1's and 0's cycling a particular register bit, and since the SAGE was a dual machine, some local talent had one playing right and left hand boogie-woogie.
Can you imagine the design meetings? "Good lord, who was it that decided 50 kilo chassis would be in vogue this year!?"
Is there any information on what this thing cost to make? Was it in the millions? several tens or hundreds of thousands?
I was at the talk which Nathan Myhrvold gave (he paid for it) at the opening ceremony for the exhibit. He did not give a figure, but my impression was $10 million (US) or more. Nathan did make a comment about the ridiculous cost of shipping it via air from the UK to the US. :-)
-Todd
Omne ignotum pro magnifico.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
IBM did not invent pipelining as the captions suggest. It was invented by Zuse, 20 years earlier.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It _is_ a replica, but just not in the way you imagined.
The (British) _Science_ Museum has (or had) a workshop for building Difference Engine No. 2. This is the second one, built by replicating the first. They can't build one by following Babbage's plans, because his plans are wrong in subtle ways, and had to be corrected. One of the things the Science Museum gained by making the first one was a _correct_ set of plans for the machine. If you have a lot of money and want a Difference Engine, I have no doubt that the Science Museum would start up that workshop again and build another replica for you too.
Good point. You are correct. Thank you for your comment.
-Todd
Omne ignotum pro magnifico.
In 1980 I was programming on an Amdahl 470 with a whopping 1 Gigabyte of disk memory. This required a large room full of IBM Winchester drives, looking for all the world like some sort of high-tech laundromat. The computer itself was in another large room full of equipment, and a laser printer the size of a VW microbus (no kidding).
This machine also came with not one, but two full time consulting engineers, one from Amdahl for hardware problems, and one from IBM for software problems. The Amdahl CE made $ 50K per year, which seemed like an impossibly high salary to us grunt programmers.
The biggest game on this machine was a dungeons and dragons type game written in PL1. I have often wondered what that game really was and what its history was. ( I never played it since as a student I couldn't afford it - with the IBM mainframe philosophy, you were charged for everything, which came out of my grant, and machine time was not cheap. Logging in to check the status of my jobs and immediately logging out cost about $ 3.00, for example.)
I think you'll find that this was probabaly down to the costs of having the parts made and the maybe one person who was officially on the project. A lot of skilled people gave some serious time to the project. If you included their time, it would be much more.
See my journal, I write things there
Yeah, thanks for that mod. I'd like to hear your reasoning for it. I think you'll find it's well documented that many of the early programmers were women and that women only make up a small proportion of programmers now.
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
I think you'll find that this was probabaly down to the costs of having the parts made and the maybe one person who was officially on the project. A lot of skilled people gave some serious time to the project. If you included their time, it would be much more.
I agree. I said $10 million (US) or more. I did not want to over-estimate. And, as you say, the machining of the parts was certainly expensive.
-Todd
Omne ignotum pro magnifico.
When I saw the title, I thought it mean the big, beautiful boxes of the > $500 display cards...
Oddly enough, there apparently are some people that still use them. The train ticketing, phone book, and a number of other services are still up and in use.
Not odd at all considering the various threats of Internet, from spam to virus, credit cards frauds, DoS etc. Minitel pretty much insure that whomever you phone is legit provided you don't misstype the phone number. It's a very helpful and desirable feature for some sensitive businesses (chemist ordering prescription drugs, etc.)
And thanks to being a passive terminal, Minitel is immune to virus and trojans by nature. Being so simple, there are no bugs either I'm aware off. And being text only makes for a great bonus to blinds who can plug whatever Braille device they want to use it.
... would be used if all computers were still that big!
So, was this used to drive a very early model of EMH?
So where's the Crushinator?
Okay, suppose we are back in the forties. We have lots of sound and telephone technology. There are tape and wire recorders. We have some early TV technology. There are mechanical calculators and cash registers. You have Hollerith punched cards, Jacquard looms, and the Harringay Tote. How would you set about it? Telephone technology and mercury delay lines were used for early memory, but you had to wait for your bit to arrive back. TV read/write tubes were used to store a small 2D array of dots and re-sample them, but they weren't really RAM yet.
For me, the big missed opportunity was the neon lamp. A neon lamp may take 20 volts to strike, but will run on 5 volts. A neon lamp would store a bit. You could even address a single bulb in a 2D array of them by X and Y buses, and query the state non-destructively, or change its state without affecting the others. Rather than having hundreds of little glass tubes, you might seal a 2D array into a single, flat tube. You would then have an early plasma display (remember the early orange ones in the eighties could store data?). There were calculating valves like the decatron (I remember using those) but, tantalizingly, no large-scale plasma arc logic.
What would you do?
I got it when a company I worked for replaced those huge drives with an EMC box. Exellent fan, it's silent and produces a lot of air flow, very nice to have in my bedroom during hot summer nights.
It is simple fact that many cryptographic systems are uncrackable in the absence of all knowledge of how they work - but in the real world keys must be exchanged somehow, and encryption must always have a mechanism, and these are always potential vulnerabilities.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
What part of "no fatties" didn't you understand?
It appears to be an early prototype of a "graphecon", "radechon", or some other type of scan converter tube. The dual electron guns and image plate rule it out as a selectron.
The selectron was a real neat piece of engineering, and must have been a beautiful sight to see in operation, with rows of blinking phosphor dots, one for each stored bit.
A comprehensive page on the selectron tube here, with LOTS of pictures and technical data:
http://home.att.net/~thercaselectron/index1.html
Run your mouse over the tube pins on the front page to see a simulation of the tube in operation.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Alan Turing (genuflect three times) calculated that gin (i.e. 60% water/40% ethanol) was as good as mercury. But it wasn't "exotic" enough to be approved for use.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I've been away from the scene from awhile but can someone tell me which phone is capable of performing 160 million Floating Point Operations per second? At 6 clock cycles per Floating Point Instruction (which I really doubt), that would be running at a clock rate of 1GHz. I recall that even NOP (No Operation) instructions take a clock or two to execute which is why they used to be (still are?) used in some timing loops. Even with pipelining that advances every clock cycle, I find it hard to believe that 355.0/113.0 done out to 6 or 10 digits of (equivalent) precision can be done 160 Million times per second. I can see a phone micro maybe handling 160MIPS (Instructions Per Second), but not floating point.
For most purposes, 355/113 is close enough.
If you want to see some big boxes, VCF East is being held Sept 12-13th, at INFOAGE in Wall NJ.
Check out http://www.vintage.org/ for more information.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
very few people realize the power that sits in the palm of their hands these days. The computational power of a cell phone is vastly superior to that of computers that used to fill entire rooms! More people need to appreciate whats really going on here. It's not just a computer, it's a calculator. A very fast calculator crunching huge amounts of numbers for YOU. There is a machine in your pocket flipping trillions of 1's and 0's! It's nothing short of a miracle that we have learned to harness electricity in this way and on such a small scale.
From TFA: The card punch portion of the Hollerith Census Machine. For the 1990 census, there were slots to record what farm equipment was present, what lighting was used in the home, and the usual number of people in the household, among other piece of data.
I think they mean 1890 not 1990.
Proverbs 21:19
I always see this comparison and wonder if it is really true.
In the article they compare a phone to a Cray1.
Isn't the Cray massively parallel and always working on 64bit words?
Would it really be possible to do the *same* calculations as fast on a contemporary phone?
With mainframes, the attraction is the fast IO. The computer is not just the processor, but has processing power spread about to all the external tape and disk drives, io processing boxes etc, each with their own memory channels.
I wonder if a modern ARM 200Mhz or so in a phone could keep up?
I suspect the DSP in your optical mouse has more CPU power than a mainframe of the '60s or '70s.
Google says a typical optical mouse has a DSP rated at 18 MIPs. However they define a MIP, that's a lot of VAXes in the palm of your hand.
After figuring out how the machines worked, it became a simple matter to brute force the machines (try every combination) using mechanical means, ie the Bombes. This was simpler then it sounds because of some exploitable weaknesses (the same letter will never encryt to itself, the wiring in the disks wasn't changed, etc) The Bombes tried every possible combination of settings of an encoded message looking for the string "EIN" (German for one, Turring himself was said to have come up with this neat little hack) These possible decrypts were passed on to a human to check if the made sense. Remember that this was all done with a mechanical system. Late in the war, when the Germans were changing their codes every hour, this system was able to keep up.
OK, if I recognize this stuff (and likely still could run), do I need to worry I'll be next to be crated up and carried off to a museum?
Greg
#!/bin/sh
# Everyone seems to forget that browsers can SCROLL - no need to
# break ONE ARTICLE into dozens of separate pages that need to be
# loaded one at time, forcing you to wait for for it to load each tiny bit
# over the net - if its all one scrollable page, all the rest of it loads while
# you are reading the first part, then all one has to do is scroll the page.
# If you really need an ad impression for each photo, put them all on the same page too.
BASE1=http://www.pcauthority.com.au/
BASE2=Gallery/153867,computer-history-museum-photo-gallery-weird-fascinating-photos-including-a-giant-cray-and-a-60kg-hard-drive.aspx/
BASE=${BASE1}${BASE2}
(
x=1
while ( test $x -lt 58); do
echo "<P>"
wget ${1}.htf ${BASE}${x} | grep ImageGallery_CurrentImage | sed 's/</<br></g'
echo "<P>"
x=$(($x+1))
done
) > file.html
He had a 1 kb. magnetic core memory module, maybe 6-8" cubed and heavy as all get up in his office. They had shepherd crooks to pull someone out of the machinery if they touched something they shouldn't have but he was unable to procure one of those.
I started out with a company that sold removable-platter hard drives. We had 75MB and 150MB versions, both about the size a dishwasher. Computer parts weren't expendable back then; we repaired everything.
Since the platters were removable, the read/write heads were prone to damage from dust and such, despite significant airflow and filtering when the lid was locked down. Heads had to be replaced regularly.
It takes considerable physical force to drive a stack of read/write heads back and forth across large (approx. 16") platters in a matter of milliseconds. This was accomplished by means of large electromagnetic coils. The head assembly was built as light as possible. To keep the whole machine from jumping across the floor, the moving coil pushed and pulled against a piece of thick, heavy steel that looked like a short, stocky cannon.
Aligning a replacement head had to be done live. To prevent catastrophic disk damage, however, these devices had an "emergency retract" system that would yank the heads back off the platters if the power failed, platters lost speed or something similar. Imagine a large but light-weight head assembly attached to a huge coil, pulsed by a large capacitive discharge, anchored to a small steel cannon. If you were aligning a head and had your fingers in the way of that, it would easily take them off. It was necessary to insert a special safety pin to prevent this from happening.
Ah, memory planes.
In the late 50's/early 60's my sister-in-law's aunt had a thriving home business employing neighbor ladies to string memory in her garage. Yes, they sat around with needles stringing those little loops on very thin wires by hand.
I was expecting to see something from Xerox in there, considering that they invented so much of present-day computing.
The IBM 360/91 was an interesting computer. It tried to re-order instructions for maximum performance. It didn't do it very well. It was infamous for its "imprecise interrrupts".
...laura
A comprehensive page on the selectron tube here, with LOTS of pictures and technical data:
http://home.att.net/~thercaselectron/index1.html
Run your mouse over the tube pins on the front page to see a simulation of the tube in operation.
I see what they did there, with a glider going down the bottom panel as you sweep from left to right. Life is good. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/FSQ-7