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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."
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.
" 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
...until you plug it in, at which point you'd better pray you've got adequate cooling.
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
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.
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!!
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.
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 based on user account deletion
***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
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.
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
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."
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.
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.