Big, Beautiful Boxes From Computer History 238
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."
5 meg @ 27 kilos (Score:3, Funny)
Going off of those standards, the thumbdrive sitting on my desk should weigh 22,118.4 kilos.
Double that because i've got two.
Re:This stuff is so cool (Score:5, Funny)
Kg? (Score:1, Funny)
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.
Re:This stuff is so cool (Score:4, Funny)
Oh well...
Re:The CDC 6600 console (Score:5, Funny)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CDC_6600_console.JPG [wikipedia.org]
I think on first sight I would have to fight the urge to back away slowly out of the room.
Re:Kg? (Score:1, Funny)
I kindly suggest you go get laid.
Re:This stuff is so cool (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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What kind of dumbass captions are these? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:This stuff is so cool (Score:3, Funny)
Windows 95 == Mac 85!
Re:Kg? (Score:5, Funny)
You do know you're posting on slashdot? We hate Windows.
* RIMSHOT *
Re:What kind of dumbass captions are these? (Score:3, Funny)
Ann ewe no your write, two. Owl wise ewes a spill chucker!