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Fifty-Year-Old Computer Being Restored
James Green directs us to
"a Sunday Age (Melborne) article which describes the discovery of a 52 year old computer found in a dusty warehouse weighing in at 2,000 kilograms. Attempts are underway to get the CSIRAC up and running as a museum piece next year." They say it uses 30 kilowatts per hour; I think they mean 30 kilowatt-hours per hour.
There's only one of these things, so no one can build a beowolf cluster out of it.
I have to wonder whether this will have any impact on the MS antitrust suit, since perhaps MS can point to this thing and say: "Look, it's competition, and it's not running Windows!" Maybe this's why the Justice Department has become a bit more open to the idea of settling through arbitration!
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
52 years old... If they restore it to actual operational status I'll bet they don't run it for very long at a time. Spare tubes and such are gonna be a bear to find. Power shouldn't be a big deal, there's almost certainly some local power company that'd eat the bill to have a "Sponsored by" sign on it.
I wanna know if they'd put it on the 'net, assuming of course they could find implementors for the necessary software. I'd be willing to do a little work on that, just to see it done. Show up the guy with the TRS80 you can telnet to.
Somebody beat me to the inevitable Beowulf comment.
no, kilowatt is a measure of power, which is energy per time. so kilowatts per hour is energy per time^2
-- open source? sounds like the real book --
Well if the museum doesn't want it, we can always give it to our public schools. They are in need of an upgrade.
LocalEmperor
There's a truth about the first computers that people rarely discuss anymore, and its about time somebody set the record straight.
We all know that most of the first computers didn't work at all, they were little more than great empty cabinets with flashing lights. The real truth on how they computed isn't rooted in the development of the vacuum tube or the transistor, it was due to the hundreds of midgets who lived inside the machine and worked day and night on mathematics problems.
Those first computers had to be built to confuse the ruskies, we all agree on that, but at what cost? What was the human toll in pushing those little guys faster and faster, first 1000 times faster than regular humans, then millions of times. Those first years were lessons in heat dissipation of a different sort, let me tell you 720 midgets in a box need a special kind of cooling.
Let's not let history slip from our memories and cause us to forget the real, tiny heroes of the information age.
Hotnutz.com
Let's buy 1000 P3125 Alpha Coolers and overclock this thing to Kingdom Come!
--------
Oscarfish.com: tropical fish with attitude. Way t
Not only was CSIRAC the 4th stored program computer in the world, and oldest surviving, it was also probably the first computer to generate music
MrCreosote Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump! "You're right! There isn't enough room to swing a cat in here!"
The article goes into little detail about the archetecture, other than saying it has 1024 bytes, or 1k of RAM. How much was it a tube computer, electronic switching computer or what else?
If it was a tube computer, could you imagine the heat of 40 meters square of tubes and switches would generate! I though my area was warm with 2 21" and 2 17" tubes a-blazing!
1.3L, 3 moving parts, 280 HP, no Turbos, wanna Race? RotaryNe
The comment above this one finally hits the nail on the head, with one small caveat. Saying either kWh/h or kW/h is silly. But kW/h is wrong, and kWh/h is ACTUALLY CORRECT, as silly as it may seem. Look at your electric bill. Mine gives my energy usage in kWh/day, which is the same d@mn thing as kWh/h, with a time conversion. It is also correct to say that the machine uses 30kW. This is akin to saying that it uses an average power (or, less likely, a perfectly constant power) of 30kW.
Another old computer that was rebuilt...
:)
http://www.computer50.org/
Interesting because it was the world's first stored program machine, was programmed by Alan Turing, and was built just down the road from where I am at the moment.
And best of all, there are emulators and programs you can download for it...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Details of CSIRAC can be found here
Also, documentation is available (not online) here
MrCreosote Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump! "You're right! There isn't enough room to swing a cat in here!"
My only questions is how big a "standard sized room" is.
- a Sunday Age (Melborne) article which describes the discovery of a 52 year old computer found in a dusty warehouse weighing in at 2,000 kilograms.
This should read 'Melbourne'. I would have put it up sooner, but I typed in http://segfault.org by mistake- Because the tunes were first played between 1951 and 1953, Doornbusch is confident it was probably the first computer music anywhere.
An interesting fact that would be nice to confirm is that the played the worlds first computer generated music. I've heard the tape on the ABC's Science show (http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/ss.htm) last year.- In 1948 he, with Maston Beard, commenced the design of a stored program electronic computer. This machine, the CSIR Mark I, was developed largely independently of work then underway in Britain and the US.
There's also a link to the machines co-creator, Trevor Pearcey- http://www.pearcey.org.au/
It will be good to go and have a peek and listen.http://www.pearcey.org.au/obituary.html
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
See how everyone jumps to conclusions? The article says kilowatts per hour, i.e., kilojoules per hour squared, so it's obvious they're talking about an acceleration: every hour the machine stays connected, its power demand goes up by 30 kilowatts. This is because in the early days of computing, they knew how to store stuff in memory but didn't know how to remove it, so the memory kept piling up and consuming more and more kilowatts - sorry, kilojoules. Also, valves/lamps/tubes take a long time to warm up,so this also has some incidence on the power consumption. Also, the little prongs on the punching machine get more and more blunt as you go on, so they need more energy to pierce the paper or cardboard (they don't specify whether it uses tape or cards). There are a whole lot of similar factors to take into account - so stop degrading reporters who obviously know much more about their subject than all of you smart-arsed nerds! ( :-) )
Adam:What kept you?
God:Rome wasn't built in a day
It's a fascinating device to look at - at first glance, it looks like a piece of old radar junk you'd find in a disposals store, until you talk to some of the people who understand the thing. It all starts to make sense then - the mercury tube memory is particularly clever. Even more fascinating is some of the software written for it, such as the "autocoder" program which looks suspiciously like a proto-compiler, written at or before the same time as FORTRAN and COBOL.
Check out this CSIRAC site.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Specs for the CSIRAC (Hyperlink is to picture of the machine) can be found Here. Includes specs for the memory, drum storage devices, etc..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
"Valve" is another term for vacuum tube.
--
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
no, kilowatt is a measure of power, which is energy per time. so kilowatts per hour is energy per time^2
:) Leave it on for two hours, and it will have used 60 kW*h. Use it only for half an hour, and you only use 15 kW*h. Get the idea?
It has been long enough since I took a science course that I can't remeber the science aspect of all these formula (formuli? formulas?). But I do have to worry about my electric bill, so I know how this works.
Watts is how much juice it takes to run something. (I say "juice" because I can't remember if the technical term is power or energy or what.) For example, a 100 watt lightbulb means it draws 100 watts whenever it is turned on.
The watt-hour is a measure of power usage. If you run a 100 watt lightbulb for an hour, you just used 100 watt-hours. If you run a 50-watt lightbulb for two hours, you still use 100 watt-hours.
This is how the power company bills you. If the only thing in your house is a space heater that draws 1000 watts, running it all the time will use 24000 watt-hours, or 2.4 kilowatt-hours, per day. If you run two of them, you will use 4.8 kw*h per day. The "hours" in "kilowatt-hours" is a theoretical hour, not a real-time hour.
Thus, I would assume CSIRAC draws 30 kilowatts of power whenever it is turned on. I suppose you could say it uses 30 kW an hour -- if you leave it on for an hour.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
IMHO, there is no possibility of the machine EVER being fired up again, unfortunately. While it's a nice dream, it's likely that trying to restart the thing would do nothing but cause a large fire. These are 50-year-old vacuum tubes, people!
It is worth pointing out that "restored" does not mean "made operational". Restoration could simply mean dusting it off and replacing gaping holes in the front panels so that it looks like it did when it was operational.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.