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Big, Beautiful Boxes From Computer History

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the know-your-past dept.

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."

39 of 238 comments (clear)

  1. Nice photos... by Archaemic · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. ahh by Dyinobal · · Score: 4, Informative

    I love BBW errr I mean BBB.

  3. What kind of dumbass captions are these? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    " 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)?

    1. Re:What kind of dumbass captions are these? by gregben · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Most of the captions are chock full of
      factual, grammatical, and spelling errors.
      Sad, because this sort of codswallop is
      propagated to the unknowing public and
      difficult to correct once "out of the bag".

    2. Re:What kind of dumbass captions are these? by mwvdlee · · Score: 3, Informative

      As I understand it, a big reason why Enigma was succesfully broken is because some of it's users kept using the same "keys" for it.
      Had the germans used the Enigma how it was meant to be used, it might not have been broken at the time.

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    3. Re:What kind of dumbass captions are these? by Plunky · · Score: 3, Funny

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

    4. Re:What kind of dumbass captions are these? by tomrud · · Score: 4, Informative

      As I understand it, a big reason why Enigma was succesfully broken is because some of it's users kept using the same "keys" for it.
      Had the germans used the Enigma how it was meant to be used, it might not have been broken at the time.

      They (the code breakers) could also use "known plain text" attacks quite a lot. Many operators tended to use the same greeting phrase over and over again. In addition, the Germans sent their weather reports encrypted. The British Navy could easily check the weather and get even more "known plain text".

      --
      For a nice date: Call strftime(3C)!
    5. Re:What kind of dumbass captions are these? by Ciggy · · Score: 5, Interesting

      A lot of work was done on breaking Enigma BEFORE WWII - by the Polish.

      The wheel wirings had been discovered (whether by fair means or foul - ie capturing the actual wheels - I can't remember). Enigma was basically hacked^Wcracked by using the fact that a lot of the German messages had key, crib phrases at the start or end of the messages, and that no letter could encrypt to itself. It was Bombes which were the set the task of finding the starting position of the wheels given a possible crib match.

      The German Navy used an enhanced enigma machine which used 4 instead of the normal 3 rotating wheels and so was harder to crack. That was helped by the capture of the settings books (about 2 years before the US entered the war).

      It was the Lorentz cypher, as used by Hitler and the high command, was the cypher that was decrypted with the aid of the Colossi. A Lorentz machine was bult at Bletchely Park by modifying a British cypher machine.

      Bletchley Park is well worth a visit to see the reconstructed Colossus and the computing museum - it was most odd to see the computers I used as a wee lad in the museum.

      --

      A rose by any other name would smell as sweet;
      A chrysanthemum by any other name would be easier to spell
    6. Re:What kind of dumbass captions are these? by hughk · · Score: 4, Informative

      Noooo!!!!

      Colossus was developed for breaking cryptographic material (Fish) from Lorenz telex style stream ciphering machines (Tunny). Enigma was broken by the Bombes which were more mechanical in nature.

      All quite clear if you visit Bletchley Park in the UK, the rather lower budget British museum of cryptography and computing. Both the Colossus and Bombe reconstruction projects were run out of BP and if are lucky you can get a talk on their operation from Tony Sale or one of the other builders.

      --
      See my journal, I write things there
    7. Re:What kind of dumbass captions are these? by Ciggy · · Score: 3, Informative

      IIRC the method to encrypt was to get the relevant wheels in the relevant order, set the key letters, insert into machine, use the initial setting, and plug up the letter swaps - these were changed on a daily basis. The operator then chose a 3 character key for his message and typed this in twice to create the first 6 characters of the encrypted message; finally, the wheels were reset to the operator's chosen key and the message encrypted.

      On receipt, the daily initial setting was set up and the first 6 characters of the message entered whereupon the key should come out twice (allowing transmission errors to be spotted...and also allowing a weak spot for breakers).

      The operators, having to send lots of messages tended to get lazy and use sequences on the keyboard, eg if they had been using the QWERTY keyboard, they would use keys like: QWE, QAZ, WSX, ZAQ, XSW, EWQ, etc.

      --

      A rose by any other name would smell as sweet;
      A chrysanthemum by any other name would be easier to spell
  4. Favorite quote by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  5. Re:This stuff is so cool by Mr.+Roadkill · · Score: 4, Funny

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

  6. From the advent of the personal computer by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:From the advent of the personal computer by cowbutt · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      Some contemporary monitors can be rotated between landscape and portrait orientations; the Lenovo L220x, for example. It's a feature that's more popular in pre-press organisations.

    2. Re:From the advent of the personal computer by rubies · · Score: 3, Interesting

      ...because in use they aren't terribly functional. One of the secretaries I used to work with back in the eighties had a Radius portrait display on a Mac II - it was awful as seeing the whole page at a time was far less important than seeing what was on the page clearly. Print Preview pretty much killed portrait monitors stone dead.

    3. Re:From the advent of the personal computer by KokorHekkus · · Score: 4, Informative

      Also, check out the keyboard on this beast! Not QUERTY. Not DVORAK. Who thought that would be a good idea?

      That's a french Minitel terminal (their videotex system, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel). The telephone company gave people free terminals if they would forgo printed telephone books. Remeber, this was the early 80:s so there must have been enough people with less than stellar keyboard skills who'd rather peck away on a ABC-keyboard than hunt around on a AZERTY-keyboard if given the choice. But I'm pretty certain that most terminals had the french standard AZERTY keyboard (here's the Minitel 1 http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Minitel_1.JPG )

    4. Re:From the advent of the personal computer by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 3, Informative

      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?

      Since the 1970's, and possibly earlier, computer monitors have piggybacked off TV technology, which first standardized on the 4:3 ratio and later moved to 16:9. The 4:3 ratio was a compromise between picture-tube technology, which wanted to present a circular face, and the material presented, which tended to be wider than it was tall.

      Why is that? Well, it's they way we're used to seeing our world and the things in it. The human visual field is wider than it is tall, because the things we're looking at tend to be spread out more horizontally than vertically. Your food and your enemies are likely to be at approximately the same level as you are (standing or growing on the ground), so it's better to be able to take in more information from the space "around" you than from the space "above" (which is likely to be empty) or "below" (which is likely to be close, and therefore smaller and less occupied).

      Printed matter in Western languages, though, especially code, tends to occupy a relatively narrow width and extend further in the vertical direction. That's why writers and coders want taller monitors, and that's why the relentless drive to "wider", that is, more squat aspect ratios is bad news for the computer field.

  7. Leo, the tea-shop computer by mister_dave · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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).

    1. Re:Leo, the tea-shop computer by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Lots of machines from that era had strange ways of storing data. A few used flip-flops as registers a bit later, but for main storage (at least, until magnetic core memory came in) they typically used something like that. Another popular method, for example, was to display something on a CRT, which caused a change in charge on the screen, and then read back the charge. The charge only lasted a fraction of a second, but it was long enough to draw the entire contents of the screen and then redraw it by reading back the charge.

      If you visit Manchester University's computer science department then you'll see a 2KB magnetic core memory in one of the corridors. It's about the size of a wardrobe, and you can see how each individual bit was stored. The first computer my university bought used this kind of memory, and allocated 200 bytes to lookup tables for addition and multiplication. Neither of these were handled in hardware; if you wanted to add two numbers together, you looked up the address in the lookup table constructed by combining the two digits, read the result (if the overflow bit was set you then did the same process with a one and the result of the next digit) then moved on to the next digit. The machine used 6-bit bytes, each of which stored a decimal digit with some condition codes. Words were variable-length, with one of the values being reserved as an end-of-word marker. Everything was stored in little-endian format so that you could add arbitrary-length numbers by adding their digits together in pairs until you got to the end-of-word marker for one and then just copy the digits for the other. Adding two numbers together could take several hundred instructions; not an inconsiderable length of time given that this was an era when computer speeds were measured in thousands of instructions per second. Runtimes for nontrivial programs were measured in hours.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  8. It's sad that none of it works by Animats · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:It's sad that none of it works by Dadoo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      There's one still open in Bozeman, Montana.

      I've been to the one in Bozeman. It looks cheesy on the outside, since it's in a strip mall, but it's actually pretty cool. It's also more a museum of information technology, than a computer museum (since it starts out with stone tablets), though they do have a lot of old computer equipment.

      Surprisingly, the coolest part isn't the computer equipment; it's the Gutenburg press. They actually have original stock (paper) that, unlike most museums, they allow you to touch. Very cool.

      --
      Sit, Ubuntu, sit. Good dog.
  9. You would think they could have gotten this right. by bezenek · · Score: 5, Informative
    The caption on one of the photos (Image 30) reads:

    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.
  10. Re:This stuff is so cool by El+Lobo · · Score: 4, Funny
    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...

    --
    It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
  11. CDC by solanum · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  12. Re:The CDC 6600 console by dbIII · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  13. I remember being inside a Sage by tinrobot · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:I remember being inside a Sage by vtcodger · · Score: 4, Informative

      ***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.***

      The sites had two computers, not one. The switched between them once a day so they could check all the vacuum tubes on the off line computer -- of which I'm pretty sure there were only about 6000. Mostly they were 6SN7 dual triodes so there were actually about 12000 switches in each computer. Memory was 68K by 32 bits wide, and software was continually swapped in from drums in the background. Instruction cycle time was 6 microseconds. The specs weren't vastly different from a 1980s IBM PC with 256K of memory.

      The software was written in assembler and was speced to accept digitized radar from 16 sites, support 40 or 80 (can't remember which) consoles, track up to 300 aircraft simultaneously, control dozens of manned interceptors plus unmanned Bomarc interceptors, communicate with four or five adjacent sites digitally, and some number of manual sites via teletype, and some other things. And it actually did most of that. (I think it maxed out a little below 200 simultaneous tracks). Try THAT on a 8088

      In general, the software -- which cost a fortune -- worked. Not perfectly, but better than Windows and Office.

      And, yes, SAGE needed a lot of air conditioning. The lights in parts of Santa Monica used to dim momentarily when the air conditioning at the RAND System Reseach labs development facility started up.

      *** It was a two story building***

      It was a four story building. And the computers were on the second floor only. Another floor held something like 40 (80?)desk sized consoles -- each with a fairly large display, a light gun (closest thing today would be a mouse), and a button panel. Other floors held offices, Telco equipment, etc. The consoles were used to monitor target tracking, control interceptors, etc. There were also a half dozen or so regional command centers -- also with AN/FSQ7s that were configured a bit differently.

      --
      You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
  14. Re:This stuff is so cool by Jurily · · Score: 3, Interesting

    15 years is not that much. We already had Pentiums in 1994. The article is about a time when CPU cycles were more expensive than programmer time and text data took a lot of space.

    The UI itself hasn't got significantly better since Windows 95. (Hands up if you would actually consider using a graphical interface without a task bar.)

  15. Wow by John+Pfeiffer · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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*
  16. Re:This stuff is so cool by Hal_Porter · · Score: 3, Informative

    Also, I've seen this picture before. Two questions: one, is it real. Two: please tell me the steering wheel is to avoid computer crashes.

    http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/computer.asp

    Although the photograph displayed could represent what some people in the early 1950s contemplated a "home computer" might look like (based on the technology of the day), it isn't, as the accompanying text claims, a RAND Corporation illustration from 1954 of a prototype "home computer." The picture is actually an entry submitted to a Fark.com image modification competition, taken from an original photo of a submarine maneuvering room console found on the U.S. Navy web site, converted to grayscale, and modified to replace a modern display panel and TV screen with pictures of a decades-old teletype/printer and television (as well as to add the gray-suited man to the left-hand side of the photo)

    --
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  17. Re:This stuff is so cool by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  18. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 4, Funny

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  19. Bad histor in there... by serviscope_minor · · Score: 3, Informative

    IBM did not invent pipelining as the captions suggest. It was invented by Zuse, 20 years earlier.

    --
    SJW n. One who posts facts.
  20. Re:This stuff is so cool by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

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

    Windows 95 == Mac 85!

  21. Minitel won't die... by Anne+Honime · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  22. Re:Kg? by tehcyder · · Score: 4, Funny

    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 *

    --
    To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
  23. This is wrong, plain wrong by Kupfernigk · · Score: 4, Informative
    Sorry, it was the Poles obtained German Enigmas and took them to the UK. The news that the Germans relied on Enigma was important, but the main reason the British were able to beat Enigma was that the Germans were insufficiently careful in its use. When the system changed later in the war, the Royal Navy (NOT the USN, contrary to the lies of Hollywood) acquired a naval Enigma machine from a sinking German submarine. (They also captured a German weather boat at one point.)

    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."
  24. Re:5 meg @ 27 kilos by Mostly+a+lurker · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It is worth noting that the disk drives at the museum are not first generation. An original IBM 350 weighed over a ton! It had a capacity of about 4.4 MB and a peak transfer rate a little over 8KB per sec. It is amazing to realize that a modern consumer 2TB drive has the capacity of about 400,000 IBM 350 drives and a transfer rate over 10,000 times faster.

  25. There is more to it by cybergrue · · Score: 4, Informative
    Enigma started out as a commercial product marketed to commercial entities (mid 1930's) and early versions were sold to the public. IIRC, technical details were published (patents, etc) and it was from these commercial models that the Poles did a lot of their work. When Poland was invaded, the Polish cryptography team made its way to England and helped kickstart the Allied effort.

    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.