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barythrin

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Ok I had a worse topic but thought this would be fairly cool for those of us bored.

I'm watching a TV show called "The IT Crowd" and while my friends love it (I'm still giving it a chance) but dude.. the computers they have laying around the office are sweet! How many can you find? ;-) They even have (probably a shell) of an Altair!

TV Series:
Triumph of the Nerds

Movies:
Pirates of Silicon Valley
 
Chuck(G) said:
I like this one myself What was the batch spool computer at MIT at this time? 1401 maybe?
Click to expand...

At the beginning of this video I think he said 7090.

I'm basically out of my depth here, but I was just trying to figure out what computer I would have been shown when I was visiting the MIT electrical engineering department in 1966. It was a bit of a blur, but it was an awful lot of racks in a special room. What I decided is that it was probably a 7094 which apparently they would have gotten in 1963 when they upgraded the 7090. What confuses me is that I remember seeing a blue or green machine and the 7094 was supposedly red. Funny that there's not a lot of pictures of these things. You'd think that IBM would proudly present a picture of each model like automobile lovers put out on calenders.

However from my reading it looks like time sharing was first developed on the PDP-6. MIT was the biggest buyer of those. (36 made I think) The musticians site has a great article relating to time sharing here:
http://www.multicians.org/thvv/7094.html
 
As far as YouTube channels go, I really dig this one. It has dozens of interesting vintage CG short films going back to the 1970s. Really a great time capsule of historical advances in 3D animation.
 
Ole Juul said:
At the beginning of this video I think he said 7090.
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No, that was the main CPU that the terminals were connected to. He refers several times to "another computer" that did the card input and printer output to mag tape. The usual arrangement was a 1401 doing the unit record I/O and a 7000-series computation backend. But the 1401 wasn't the only system that could do this; after all, it was just reading cards and writing tape or reading tape and printing, so just about any inexpensive system with the necessary unit-record gear and a tape drive or two would do the job.
 
I remember someone in these Forums mentioning the BBC TV movie "Micro Men", about the rivalry between Sinclair and Acorn, taking place within the emerging British 8-bit home computer industry back in the late seventies and early eighties. I definitely enjoyed it.

Whoever posted the link to it (I don't remember which forum member it was): thank you! :)
 
It's odd how everybody in these 60s computer labs seems to always wear a suit and tie, and typically have that same pair of thick glasses. :D
 
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Raven said:
It's odd how everybody in these 60s computer labs seems to always wear a suit and tie, and typically have that same pair of thick glasses. :D
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Most places had a dress code (IBM liked white shirts), so the garb was pretty much a condition of working. Back in the 60's only old people wore wire-rim glasses. I recall buying a new pair of glasses about the time the film was made--cost all of $9 complete with optometrist exam. In the 60's, coming to work in jeans and a T-shirt would be like coming to work in a Speedo today--unless you worked on a farm.
 
*finishes watching video*

Wow, they're literally discussing the invention of mainframe/terminal combination.. that's amazing that they caught this sort of thing on film! Thanks for sharing!

Pidgeonhole.. xD

Wow and they also talk about the invention of swapping to disk.. and raw usage of a disk drive! Wow this is amazing.

(above comments were typed as I watched)

That was the coolest thing I've seen in a long while.
 
Note his comment that disks had only been out for about a year. Drums, of course, go back longer and were still used right into the 1970s for high-speed secondary storage. But in 1963, they were mostly still used as primary stores.
 
Speaking of drums, why haven't they created a drum with multiple layers ( ( o ) ) as an alternative to platters on a modern HDD? Does it just always equate so that you end up with more surface area for your volume with a platter system? Is it more reliable?

If nothing else, I'd expect that that sort of arrangement would be cheaper, as according to Wikipedia they were invented in 1932, and anything that old must be cheaper to produce. Also, since the heads don't need to move, while it would take more heads, I'd actually expect it to be more reliable and possibly faster..
 
Raven said:
Speaking of drums, why haven't they created a drum with multiple layers ( ( o ) ) as an alternative to platters on a modern HDD? Does it just always equate so that you end up with more surface area for your volume with a platter system? Is it more reliable?

If nothing else, I'd expect that that sort of arrangement would be cheaper, as according to Wikipedia they were invented in 1932, and anything that old must be cheaper to produce. Also, since the heads don't need to move, while it would take more heads, I'd actually expect it to be more reliable and possibly faster..
Click to expand...

RAID with striping is much cheaper nowadays than any drum setup and probably about as fast, which is probably why you don't see them anymore.

There were movable head drums--Univac was the last major manufacturer that I was aware of that used movable-head drums on a mainframe. (One item about the FASTRAND II that's not apocryphal: You needed a very solid floor. I was aware of one installation where the unit was installed on the second floor of an older building and the heads would crash every time a big truck drove by outside.) The other interesting thing was that the head positioning was done with a bunch of levers and solenoids that directly decoded a binary number to a position on the drum. (Sort of like the much-later Ontrax disk drive that never was).

Mostly, fixed-head drums are hugely expensive in comparison to disks, although they were used for the longest time in airborne applications because they tend to be very stable, with no moving parts, but for the drum itself.

Jim Thornton attempted to build a superspeed drum for use with the CDC STAR as a paging store. It spun at some incredible speed (25K RPM?) and was enclosed in a vacuum box. They never could get it running for more than a few minutes at a time. Another idea was to use a very wide tape and put multple heads on a spinning drum; the tape would wrap the head around about 270 degrees . You could move the tape to select "frames" for high-speed transfer. That one never saw the light of day either.

Hopefully in the not too distant future, we'll have people asking about those strange things folks used to call "disks"... :)
 
I took my boy to the Karate kid. Same as the original, but I enjoyed taking my boy to it. It's a great show and my boy loved it...
 
Chuck(G) said:
Hopefully in the not too distant future, we'll have people asking about those strange things folks used to call "disks"... :)
Click to expand...

We're already well on our way to that in the HDD world, SSDs are getting faster and cheaper by the day. As for removable storage, though, I realy hope we come up with something better than optical but with the same cheapness soon enough.. If they had 5GB ZIP drives I'd probably have moved to that myself, but 750GB/disk doesn't justify the cost (at least not for me at the moment) - especially when the industry hasn't adopted them for install disks and such.

I do agree though, that while spinning parts are very cool, they're also one of the biggest bottlenecks inside of a machine, because it's limited by physical strength and physical seek speed along a spinning disk that could shatter or malfunction if created to spin too fast.

I will, however, miss the sound that old hard drives make (old in usage, not in age necessarily) that sounds like a bubbling cauldron when they're in heavy use.
 
Didn't there used to be an issue with flashdrives and xray machines or metal detectors? I guess if there was it's no longer an issue since I would think it would be all over the news still. Maybe it was only floppy magnetic media? I'm reluctant to use a SSD but that's just from me having a few USB flash drives randomly lose all my data. I only use them for throw away data now.
 
Karate kid, Swamp Creature, Mars Needs Women. I guess there's an IT angle to everything? Hehe.

Anyway, it's interesting how motors continue to rule. My "big" machine has 11 motors in it. Even my lil' DOS box has 7. People who take cooling seriously, or especially with lots of drives, will have more. I've always found it amazing how electrical motors dominate our computing technology to this day. Solid state drives will take out two motors per drive, but we're also seeing more fans for cooling. I'm waiting for a solid state power supply. That is, solid state as in no moving parts. :)
 
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