• Hi Guest!
    You can help ensure that British Car Forum (BCF) continues to provide a great place to engage in the British car hobby! If you find BCF a beneficial community, please consider supporting our efforts with a subscription.
    There are some perks with a member upgrade!
    **Upgrade Now**
    (PS: Subscribers don't see this gawd-aweful banner
Tips
Tips

Hard drive progress

Share this page

coldplugs

coldplugs

Darth Vader
Country flag
Offline
A friend sent this today. These were a little before my time but I did get to work on software that emulated these machines so their programs could run on later computers.

This is an IBM 5 meg hard drive from 1956. Ancient IBMers might remember it as a RAMAC.

(Interesting to think about it - this was a contemporary of the MGA, TR-3, and 4 cyl (BN2?) Austin-Healeys.)


305.jpg
 
Attached are some shots of the Puter I cut my teeth on:
It was the <span style="color: #006600">NORAD SAGE</span>; a 1950s era <span style="color: #000099">IBM Q7</span> computer - the largest in physical size ever built. The panels with all the lights are just the Maintenance consoles from where we would run our diagnostics. The "Drums" were the 50's answer to our hard drives of today (<u>but a LOT less storage</u>). There were two duplicate computers (we did 24 hour maintenance so one was active while the other was undergoing maintenance). There were 12 "drums" on each computer which were used to "buffer" data coming in from teh radar sites. The memory systems were of the "magnetic core" type. Big memory was a whopping 256k (yes, I said k). Little Memory was about 10k.

You may see some of these components from time to time in movies because Hollywood bought a lot of it as props when we closed it down in the early 80s. For example, if you watch Austin Powers you will see the maintenance console in teh back ground. It also makes a brief cameo in "Independence Day"

Basil
 

Attachments

  • 4360-A_computer.jpg
    4360-A_computer.jpg
    64.4 KB · Views: 75
  • 4361-Big_Mem.jpg
    4361-Big_Mem.jpg
    54.2 KB · Views: 75
  • 4362-Drum_1.jpg
    4362-Drum_1.jpg
    71.1 KB · Views: 62
  • 4363-Large_Frame.jpg
    4363-Large_Frame.jpg
    71.4 KB · Views: 59
  • 4364-LRI_Frame.jpg
    4364-LRI_Frame.jpg
    77.4 KB · Views: 55
  • 4365-Op_Console.jpg
    4365-Op_Console.jpg
    66.4 KB · Views: 55
  • 4366-sage-director.jpg
    4366-sage-director.jpg
    56.5 KB · Views: 55
  • 4367-Simplex.jpg
    4367-Simplex.jpg
    73.7 KB · Views: 62
Here's the computer we'll have in our homes in the year 2004. At least it's the one they predicted we would have in our homes in the year 2004. I like the steering wheels.
 

Attachments

  • 4368-1954HomeComputer.jpg
    4368-1954HomeComputer.jpg
    74.6 KB · Views: 101
Phew!!! What a hoot!! "of course it will not be economically feasable" and relies on "unyet invented technology"!! Doesn't seem like that long ago, is what is mind-numbing!! How wrong are we in looking into our future?? I still remember playing with short wave radio and vacuum tubes!! /bcforum/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/shocked.gif
 
Basil said:
Attached are some shots of the Puter I cut my teeth on ...NORAD SAGE
Click to expand...

An awesome machine. IBM's piece was initially called "Project High" because it was housed in a building on High Street in Poughkeepsie, NY. (How's that for trivia?) They worked with MIT to develop it.

The machines made for the Feds in that era were about 15 years ahead of the commercial computers.
 
Twosheds said:
Here's the computer we'll have in our homes in the year 2004. At least it's the one they predicted we would have in our homes in the year 2004. I like the steering wheels.
Click to expand...

That's an internet hoax that has been around for years. The display was actually in the Smithsonian, and is a manuevering room out of a submarine. The B&W image is a photoshopped compilation of a couple of different images
 
Well, that explains the steering wheels!
 
Dive dive. Oh wait that's another movie.
 
coldplugs said:
A friend sent this today. These were a little before my time but I did get to work on software that emulated these machines so their programs could run on later computers.

This is an IBM 5 meg hard drive from 1956. Ancient IBMers might remember it as a RAMAC.

(Interesting to think about it - this was a contemporary of the MGA, TR-3, and 4 cyl (BN2?) Austin-Healeys.)


305.jpg
Click to expand...

And here I thought they were installing a flight recorder ('50s vintage)!!... by the way, doesn't the fork-lift operator have things a little backwards??
 
i kinda like the ..what looks like bailing twine holding it on the lift.

mark
 
Drums in our Rammacs sat cross wise.
 
Just the mere mention of "FORTRAN" gives me HIVES!!! /bcforum/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/smirk.gif
 
I used it heavily up until about '93. Then we had a brief unhappy relationship with BASIC until we moved to C++.

The later FORTRANS were pretty good, but I agree the early versions with the dreaded "computed GOTO" were no fun. Writing code was bad enough, trying to understand and maintain it was worse. (Computed GOTO was the GOTO 20, 100, 70 syntax).

APL was my nightmare language.
 
I'll swap you Fortran for Smalltalk any day of the week. At least I could understand Fortran...
 
Back
Top