Frank and Ernest by Thaves for February 11, 2016

Your right about that………… some people are impressed by size alone……….. Just think of what a room full of us could do now……….

Can you imagine a cubic mile of tubes with their glowingcathodes and the gigawatts of heat gently rising from them?It would take ten coal trains a day to feed the power plants.

you guys are history. computing is done with phones and watches.

I am just glad that we don’t have to mess with a bunch of punch cards.

Quite possibly the first digital computer was used to unlock the mystery of Germany’s Enigma machine…

I have a dual socket for tubes that was used in one of the first computer. This dual socket was the equivalent of one bit of data. It bogles the mind how many they must have used and the power just to run the filaments.

So many stories, I don’t know where to start…In the days when computers took up an entire floor, the heat from the machines was often siphoned off to heat the buildings that housed them. When computers got smaller, they were used to control the heating systems in the same buildings. One of these buildings was a college classroom building, where an instructor, after trying to give the students a history lesson on computers as heating systems (such as the one in this paragraph), ended with an exasperated “Well, the building’s heated by computers and that’s just the way it is.” Kid in the back complained, “Then throw another one on the fire!”Back in the same era, floor-sized computers sometimes needed cooling systems, similar to auto cooling systems but a lot larger. One morning, one such computer crashed. Techs sent to investigate noticed that one of the hoses in the system had come off its mount, spilling coolant all over the place. In writing up the incident report, it was noted that the computer had become hosed because it had become de-hosed; when they re-hosed the computer, it became un-hosed.

They told us that the days of a computer filling a huge raised-floor air-conditioned room were over. Now that room is filled with racks of servers, each with incredibly more power than that one computer. The more things change?

The first computer we used, an IBM 360, had its own climate controlled room, and I remember it cost a bundle to lease. I have no idea the amount of memory or whatever it had, but I’m sure a $10 calculator is more powerful today…