Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Hardware

Fifty-Year-Old Computer Being Restored 116

Posted by jamie from the 0.2-bytes-per-pound dept.
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.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Fifty-Year-Old Computer Being Restored More

Fifty-Year-Old Computer Being Restored

Comments Filter:

  • And before it gets said (Score:4)

    by / ( 33804 ) on Monday November 22, 1999 @05:53PM (#1511491)
    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!
  • yet another gratuitous beowulf comment

    ... you beat me to it 8-P

  • How long 'til it hits the 'net? (Score:3)

    by h2odragon ( 6908 ) on Monday November 22, 1999 @05:59PM (#1511494) Homepage
    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.

  • Units (Score:1)

    by Gromer ( 9058 )

    I think they mean 30 kilowatt-hours per hour

    Or, in other words, 30 kilowatts? :-)

    Your point is well-taken, though. 30 kilowatts per hour is a pretty meaningless quantity.

  • no, kilowatt is a measure of power, which is energy per time. so kilowatts per hour is energy per time^2

  • 52 years old? (Score:5)

    by LocalEmperor ( 106514 ) on Monday November 22, 1999 @06:02PM (#1511498)
    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

  • The truth. (Score:5)

    by Matt2000 ( 29624 ) on Monday November 22, 1999 @06:06PM (#1511499) Homepage
    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 [hotnutz.com]
  • Let's buy 1000 P3125 Alpha Coolers [hardocp.com] and overclock this thing to Kingdom Come!
  • I would have to think that it should be just plain kilowatts since 30 killowats for an hour would be 30 kilowatt hours, which would make 30 kilowatt hours per hour redundant... I think....

    matguy
    Net. Admin.
  • Yeah, maybe if we overclock it enough we can get it up to the level of a microwave controller! (Actually, with all the heat this thing generates, we can probably dispense with the microwave entirely.)

  • Re:kilowatt-hours/hour? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Yes, indeed, it's kilowatts. A kilowatt is a measure of power, which is energy per time. Saying "30 kilowatts per hour" is silly, as is "30 kilowatt-hours per hour". Thirty kilowatts of power is a correct measure of power consumption.

    If something consumes 30 kilojoules of energy every second, then it consumes energy at a rate of 30 kilowatts. (One watt is one joule per second.)
  • 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.

    That depends upon which type of tubes they use. There are a few companies still manufacturing several models.. the models for example that are still required in guitar amplifiers. 12AX7's, 6L6's, 5U4's, EL34's, etc....

    I believe it was RCA that sold their manufacturing technology to a soviet company called Sovtek which is becoming a huge supplier (though musician friends are questioning their QC), and there is a company called Groove Tubes as well. There is still a Fender brand of vacuum tubes, but I think someone else manufactures them for Fender.

    A little research revealed another company called Teslovak, and another called JJ Electronics.

    I suspect these companies could tool up to manufacture any tube that was needed for this application.

  • First Synth (Score:3)

    by MrCreosote ( 34188 ) on Monday November 22, 1999 @06:20PM (#1511509)
    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 [fairfax.com.au]
  • See also
    http://technology.news.com.au/news/4280542.htm

    for a somewhat more complete story.

    Chris

    No I don't work for news limited :)
  • 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!
  • Depends on what type of tubes it takes. A lot of the highest-priced audio amplifiers still use them because, supposedly, it makes the sound better.

    The problem is getting thousands of them. Imagine calling up your local music store:

    "Can I help you?"
    "Yes, I need 10,000 12AX7s and 5000 EL84s."
    "What in the world do you need them for?"
    "Well, I'm in charge of refurbising an old computer... Hello? HELLO?"


    Hmmm... If the best audio equipment uses tubes, does that mean your computer will crash less if it uses tubes instead of transistors? ;-)
  • Sounds intresting. I'm expecting to see something pop up on eBay any day now :) I'd like to see if they can actually get it to work. Probably will light on fire the first time they turn it on. The amount of money there going to need to spend on burnt out tubes might just be a bit more then it's worth. Guess we'll just have to see.
  • Mr. Demant said:

    "It's the only first-generation computer left on this planet. As the years go by I believe its significance will increase."

    I thought the ENIAC (older than 1947) was preserved by the US government?
    Hmm...

    Please visit FreeDonation.com [freedonation.com] - You can donate Food and Medicine for FREE to Save Children. The donation is fully paid by corporate sponsors with the money they would have spent anyway on advertising. There is no charge to you.

  • 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... :)
  • Details of CSIRAC can be found here [latrobe.edu.au]

    Also, documentation is available (not online) here [unimelb.edu.au]
  • I was getting valves for my amps from a supplier that purchased a russian product and added thier logo, from what I was told up until recently alot of the former soviet radar and listening installations used valves
  • I remember these days well. Our overclocking devices were jolt cola and crystal methane.
  • Beautifully put. Too bad this bit of actual information was moderated down. The original post should not have contained the editorialization about the units anyway.

  • There's nothing in the world like plugging your fender twin into a variac, starving the amp for juice, start jammin' away, and watching the valves melt in front of your eyes.


    except maybe the sound that comes out of the amp afterwards.
  • Would this thing get near 200 FPS in Quake?

    Or does it just output to paper?

    From one extreme to another...

    E
  • Spare tubes and such are gonna be a bear to find.
    I went to a symposium a year or so ago on the Sage system -- the first world's first air defense computer system. As a backdrop to the talks, there was this huge wall of vacuum tubes that was actually a tiny piece of the computer. Someone pointed out that all those tubes were actually quite valuable -- audiophiles are willing to pay a small fortune for them. One of the speakers at the symposium, Paul Edwards, wrote The Closed World [amazon.com], which discusses the role of the Cold War in the development of computer technology.
  • they should hook this thing up to the web....well at least oint a web came at it!

    Then have it run a vending machine or some such...it would be an interesting piece of notsalgia to get your coke from a 1950's computer
  • Bzzzzt - see comment above for link to details of available doco
  • No Beowulf, but what about a Quake server???
  • My only questions is how big a "standard sized room" is.

  • Does Quake run with 16x20 graphics???
  • The ENIAC is in pieces, which are scattered everywhere.. I know this since one piece of it sits about 500 yards away from me right now at the University of Michigan.
  • Port Linux to it, if NetBSD hasn't yet been ported to it. We have to beat NetBSD in the number of most useless platforms out OS has been ported to!
  • My Bill ( And I'm not saying JPS is something to emulate ) lists.

    1: How many dollars they charge per Kilowatt hour.

    2: How many Kilowatt hours you use.

    3: How many other vindictive gratuitous charges they feel like adding on.

    So yes for scientists Kilowatt/Hour/Hour is correct. For persons simply paying an electricity bill ( the apparent context of the comment in this article ) it's 30 kWh at $1 per kWh = $21600 per month.

  • CSIRAC (Score:2)

    by goon ( 2774 )
    • 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 :) Here's a better link fairfax IT section [fairfax.com.au].

    • 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 [abc.net.au] (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/

    • http://www.pearcey.org.au/obituary.html
    It will be good to go and have a peek and listen.
  • I would especially like to see

    4/10 Computer Games

    This item contains a paper entitled 'A Few Remarks On The Games Which Can Be Played On Digital Computers. Part 1', by NV Findler, at the FBS Falkiner Nuclear Research and Adolph Basser Computing Laboratories, School of Physics, University of Sydney.

    File contents includes: published papers.

    1958c - 1958c, 0.3cm.
  • And decent heating.
  • If the best audio equipment uses tubes, does that mean your computer will crash less if it uses tubes instead of transistors?
    No, just if it uses anything instead of Windows. *rimshot*
  • Thank you for the enlightening bit :)
  • Such clumsy expressions just because someone decided that joule was not an acceptable measure of energy for commercial electricity.

    It's not a matter of being acceptable or not. A watt isn't a joule. A watt is a measure of energy used per unit time...dJ/dt, or 1 joule per second.

    We use the term watt just like we use the term amp (or ampere). Just as it's easier to express current as amps instead of coulombs per second, it's a matter of convenience to use watts instead of joules per second.

    Now if you really want to get cranky over something, how about the ridiculous English measurement system???

  • Just like 9.8 m/s/s means you're dropping to Earth 1 m/s faster each second, 1 kW/h means that it uses 1 kW more each hour.

    So after one hour of operation, the machine will use 30 kW more than when it started. So after a day of use, it's running at at least 720kW.

  • 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.

    Tubes aren't as hard to come by as you might think. Lots of companies are still selling 'em. The biggest of 'em is Antique Electronic Supply [tubesandmore.com] in Arizona; a couple of others I can think of off the top of my head are CWest Tubes [xmission.com] in Utah and Fair Radio Sales [fairradio.com] in Ohio. The audiophooles have driven the prices of some types (especially power triodes) through the roof, but many types still sell for just a few dollars each, including (IIRC) the 12A_7 types that boatanchor computers more than likely would've used by the gross. (If they're interested in economizing, they could retrofit the machine to use some of the goofball tube types developed for TV use, which are dirt-cheap...but since they're working with a one-of-a-kind machine, they probably don't want to hack it up too badly.)

    In fact, I've heard from some people that it's actually harder to fix old transistor radios than it is to fix similar equipment built with tubes, since early transistors have become scarcer than hens' teeth. Early ICs can be equally hard to come by (some talk came up in comp.sys.apple2 [comp.sys.apple2] a while back about the feasibility of reproducing the Apple I from schematics, and someone noted that some of the chips used in that machine's design are no longer available.

    With all that said, the machine would more than likely be on static display most of the time. They might fire it up for special occasions or just to verify that it still works, but I doubt they'll have it participating in GIMPS [mersenne.org] 24/7. :-)

  • Computer Being Restored (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I didn't realize that any computer beings existed.
  • Yeah, but a chip PIC doesn't look cool and massive and (most important of all) have gazillions of blinkenlights and dials and switches and whatnot encrusting it...
  • But kW/h is wrong, and kWh/h is ACTUALLY CORRECT, as silly as it may seem.

    Nah, it ain't so. kWh/h is a delta parameter, like acceleration. kW/h is a measure of the rate of power consumption, and is correct in the given context.

    The possible extrapolations of this are left as an excercise to the reader. Just don't tell anyone you're doing it if you wish to avoid being labeled as a pathetic creature ;-)

  • According to an article that appeared in the Melbourne Age IT section a few weeks ago, it's not being restored to working condition. It is being placed on display at Scienceworks Museum, hence the current publicity.

    The article stated that it was at most the fifth computer (electronic with stored programs)in the world and the oldest surviving.

    Chris
  • Several early computers used mercury for memory. It was heated because it needed to be kept at a uniform and constant temp, and that was the easiest way. The Univac I also used mercury. Every few months it had to be replaced because of accumulated schmutz. The old stuff was sold and, I'm told, financed some pretty good parties...
  • This sounds just like the computer that Waterhouse was building in Cryptonomicon - in Brisbane, AUSTRALIA! It used mercury delay lines for memory too (and made a hell of a racket when it was running!) Maybe Neal Stephenson was on to something here...
  • 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! ( :-) )

  • Some information (Score:5)

    by Goonie ( 8651 ) <robert...merkel@@@benambra...org> on Monday November 22, 1999 @11:10PM (#1511563) Homepage
    I'm a postgrad student in the CS department Melbourne University, where several people who were involved with CSIRAC still work. There are a couple of misconceptions here on Slashdot(which I don't recall being in the article, BTW).
    1. 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!
    2. I believe that n emulator has been written for it, and many of the original programs (on paper tape) have been saved and run on the emulator.
    3. The machine WILL be displayed publically in Melbourne, probably at the new Museum of Victoria that's just about completed. This will complement Sydney's Powerhouse Museum, which has a piece of Babbage's Difference Engine.

    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 [latrobe.edu.au].

  • Well, if you take this plus the UK's "Baby" machine (worlds first stored program computer) rebuilt recently plus ENIAC plus the Manchester Mark 1 (all similar ages) then a Beowulf can't be far off surely :-)

  • Re:My Bill (Re:kilowatt-hours/hour?) (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'm sick. Kilowatt-hour is kilowatt TIMES hour, not PER hour. A Watt is a Joule per second, for you unitary(sp?) challenged people, so kilowatt is Joule*calculate-this-unitless-constant-yourself, and kilowatt-hour per hour is just kilowatt (hour cancels out).

    Your typical lightbulb is 0.1 kilowatt. If you leave it on for 10 hours, you'll pay for one kilowatt*hour. And so on.

    This beast is 30 kilowatt = 300 lightbulbs.

  • Wilson tubes, and they didn't even need photocells. The "spot" was read as a charge, not by its brightness.

    They worked better in the dark, but for debugging you could swing the door over the tube face open and read the dots directly off the screen.

    Anyone else remember why "0" has a slash through it ? 8-)

  • I wonder if it is running a monolithic kernel. [Cymbal crash]
  • } >But kW/h is wrong, and kWh/h is ACTUALLY CORRECT, as silly as it may seem.
    } Nah, it ain't so. kWh/h is a delta parameter, like acceleration. kW/h is a measure of the rate
    } of power consumption, and is correct in the given context.

    Good grief. kW is a measure of rate of power consumption. kWh is total power consumed. kWh/h is the same as kW.
  • Oh, so close. kWh/h isn't a delta... kW/h is. As in "The power usage is increasing by 5 kW/h." It is VERY simple to see how the hours cancel out of kWh/h-- how can it be a delta with no time in it? *sigh*. That is precisely why kW/h is wrong in this situation. They are using a delta to describe a constant.
  • Oh, so close. kWh/h isn't a delta... kW/h is. As in "The power usage is increasing by 5 kW/h." It is VERY simple to see how the hours cancel out of kWh/h-- how can it be a delta with no time in it? *sigh*. That is precisely why kW/h is wrong in this situation. They are using a delta to describe a constant. My apologies to the other comment I accidentally posted this under-- I believe he has the right idea.

  • Well... I apparently don't know my behind from the "submit" button here. Watch as the brilliant raygundan posts comments twice in the same place, and thinks they're different!
  • I think it is stupid and a waste of time and money to restore this. Regardless of if it runs or not, its purpose is simply to be a muesum piece. The vast majority of the people out there, just want to see the beast, and not in action. If people will like to see it in action, an emulator will be better. Besides, I doubt you get to see on the console and play with it, So why waste the time and money? When I see the Altair, I just like to see it, I don't care if it runs, I don't have time to fiddle with those buttons, I have real work to do, not play with an antique that is taking me no where. But then again, I digress, I just restored a sun/30, heh, but at least it runs Unix! (NetBSD/OpenBSD), and is still useable. :-)
  • Thats what it should do...Crack code.

    Unless...

    It has a spot for a voodoo3 in it...i smell quake...or is that burning silicon?
  • That 1024 bytes figure is a bit misleading, too. According to the technical specs (here) [latrobe.edu.au] it had a 20-bit word size, and could hold 768 words in memory at once. So, in terms of bits, it manages to beat my ZX81 quite handily.
  • Specs for the CSIRAC [latrobe.edu.au] (Hyperlink is to picture of the machine) can be found Here [latrobe.edu.au]. Includes specs for the memory, drum storage devices, etc..
  • I wanna know if they'd put it on the 'net, assuming of course they could find implementors for the necessary software.

    768 words (see specs [latrobe.edu.au]) would probably be a tight fit, but the tough part would be the hardware... serial ports did not appear until much later.

    The first computer I programmed on, an IBM 1401 with 4K (decimal) core RAM, which was from a later generation - transistors and so forth - didn't have any serial ports either. Even when the IBM/360 came out, serials were a separate (and costly!) option... something like $10K for a 300-baud port, IIRC.

    Of course, you could bit-bang data to one of the panel lights - or byte-bang 8 of them, come to think of it... but even so I doubt you could find any workable TCP/IP implementation in there.

  • Theoretically, saying kW/h is not incorrect (even though the original poster probably made it wrong indeed). It means the change of power with time. Think about 10 miles per hour per second. If a car has this acceleration, it can go from 0 to 10 mph in 1 second.

    Yong Huang

  • "Valve" is another term for vacuum tube.
    --
    Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
  • I have with the article, to wit:
    "By today's standards it was not aesthetically pleasing. CSIRAC was bulky, covering 40 square metres, and sported dozens of grey metal cabinets covered with dials, switches and gauges. Colored lights adorned its panels and inside was a mass of wires and more switches."

    Well, I think it sounds pretty damned sexy looking. Wouldn't mind having this my my garage!
  • Allright, ye've shown me up as the lazy reptile I am. TCP/IP is out, I grant. Thanks for the link. Note also that it has 2K words of disk. We can bounce back a light static page to an HTTP request or reasonable fake, and put it on the web if not the 'net. 1k op/sec will not survive the slashdot effect, unless we can get Mel on it.

    20 bit word size? That'll make things a little tougher unless it's good at bit banging. I have faith in the perverse genius of the folks who do things like text mode quake ("it's for the blind, Pops, really...") to do anything they want to see done.

    Let's not drag an ugly fact across this discussion by mentioning I/O. I was raised on Intel; "We don't need no steenking I/O..." Besides, a working fake serial port can't be that hard, and having the hardware hacked to do new stuff was obviously a part of this machine's operational life, so it's not like we're betraying it's memory by taking a soldering iron to it.

    (...been up waaaay too long now...)

  • Good luck fitting it into 1k! The networking code, whatever that would mean for such a computer, would alone take up at least that much.

  • We all know what the author means. Why waste your time arguing about it? I know what it is but I'm not telling.

    ken

  • Get a kernel that fits in 1k. But first, figure out how to compile for it.

    What useless platforms has Linux been ported to anyway?

  • OS (Score:1)

    by passion ( 84900 )
    can linux be ported to it? :)
  • Exactly. It is a 30 kilowatt computer. It requires a constant supply of 30 kilowatts.
    --------
    "I already have all the latest software."
  • I kinda thought he wanted to surf with it, not surf to it.

    Can you imagine surfing via punchcard?

    TheGeek
    http://www.geekrights.org [geekrights.org]

  • Now I'm curious... why does the '0' have a slash through it?
  • no, kilowatt is a measure of power, which is energy per time. so kilowatts per hour is energy per time^2

    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. :) 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?
  • 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.

Slashdot Top Deals

"I've seen the forgeries I've sent out." -- John F. Haugh II (jfh@rpp386.Dallas.TX.US), about forging net news articles

Close