DescentBB

Stumbled on this site while surfing,
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/BRL64-a.html

Goto the index and check out the rest,
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/BRL64.html#TOC

Power requirements,
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/BRL64-Table13.html
Scope out the IBM 702 at the bottom of the list... remember this is in Kilowatts.

What do you think these programers would say if they saw our systems? Or learned that we use them to surf the net and play games

Dude! Some of those IBM mainframes had fairly decent storage - I noted one with, in effect, a 20 MB hard drive... not bad for 1964!

750 kw? o_O whoa

Having done some asm programming, some of that looks eerily familiar. Though I'm suprised at how clean and stuff some of those look. I mean in pics/movies you always see computers in this huge room with cables running everywhere, but one of those first ones just looks like a modern office with some cabinets.

Sirius wrote:Dude! Some of those IBM mainframes had fairly decent storage - I noted one with, in effect, a 20 MB hard drive... not bad for 1964!

Absolutely right ... I remember buying a 5Mb Winchester HD in 1982 for a PC and it costs like $2000. That 20 Mb drive must have been incredibly expensive.

COST, PRICE AND RENTAL RATES
Monthly
Model System/Component Purchase Lease
943 File Processor $300,000 $7,000
946 Tape Units 16,950 470
947 Tape Units 18,970 540
941 Card Reader 31,000 500

It's not the spec of machines in 2005 that would freak these guys out!

Great sizzling vacuum tubes, Batman !!

Ah, the good ole days; switches and paper tape ...

Graphical user interfaces are for wimps

Back in 1984, we were still using keypunch cards in the Air force, along with massive line printers and remote terminals.


very slow.

Now, if I only had a time machine

Back in 1984... I was a year old.

Please view my cool avatar.

*points to still working Commodore 64*

Screw 3D graphics and interactive soundtracks!

I wonder if I still have that joystick I made....

I was at Rensselaer Polytechnic in 1983, and we were using the Michigan Terminal System (MTS) on some old machine in a FORTRAN course that I was taking. We were billed on the basis of CPU time that we used, so we were given a set amount "funds" at the beginning of the semester. To log on or log off the system cost ten cents a pop. If you failed to set a limit on the maximum length of time your program was permitted to run, one inadvertent infinite loop could blow your semester's allotment in a couple minutes of real time.

My summer job in 1983 was a computer operator/programming consultant position at the local university where the principal machine was a Sperry/Univac monster. I ran a remote workstation that controlled a (chain) line printer, a concentrator hosting 16 dumb terminals and a punched card reader. While most of the compilers and programs had been converted to online use through the terminals, the poor folks who were taking statistics and conducting statistical research (using SPSS, if I recall correctly) were still obliged to use punched cards for their activities. Every day I would come in and start things up by keying in a binary sequence at my workstation that would bootstrap my machine from the pair of eight inch floppy disks in its drives. We had fires in the operations center so often that people started ignoring the fire alarms and the smoke in the hallways. Ah, good times!

I wonder what I did with the Sinclair ZX-81 that I built.

akula65 wrote:We had fires in the operations center so often that people started ignoring the fire alarms and the smoke in the hallways. Ah, good times!

O_O

And that building is still standing?

Indeed it is. I can't remember exactly what piece of equipment kept catching on fire, but it was always the same one.

If you're ever in the SF Bay Area, check out the Computer History Museum.

Pretty cool artifacts and stories there.