Posted: 8/16/2001 6:38:12 AM EDT
| HAL9000? [thinking] |
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The first one. Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computor. For a cool trip back in time, try the ENIAC simulator: [URL]http://www.seas.upenn.edu:8080/~museum/sim.html[/URL] You can program and use the "ENIAC." This thing is the greatest ever because it used vacuum tubes, that's right, the little bulb-like things in old (real old) TV's and radios. For the young'ens, this thing won't run Half-Life, so don't even try. ;) |
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OK here is another one. When I was in college studying electrical engineering (I'm not saying when) we used to do power system modeling using a 400Hz analog computer. It was given to the college by American Electric Power. This thing was huge, took up a big room and it had 60/400 hz frequency changer in the basment to power the thing. |
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DEC PDP11-45 I don't know if it was called electric pink or shocking pink but it had pink switches on the operating panel. Singer-Link GP4B Core memory with magnetized donuts and a rotating drum memory. Took up a whole room and simple math calculations like square root was done in a rack of cards with MECL logic. MDEC Vital II Paper tape. 'nuff said. |
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Computer Set, AN/UYK-7 We used 'em on the early 688 Class Fast Attack Submarines back in 1987-88. Used for weapon control and also the passive sonar. Simply turning it on DID NOT BOOT IT UP. There was a maintenance panel with a ton of indicator lamps, switches, and button on it. You had to punch in a bunch of crap just to get the thing to start up! Also it was a great space heater [;)] |
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Quoted: Computer Set, AN/UYK-7 We used 'em on the early 688 Class Fast Attack Submarines back in 1987-88. Used for weapon control and also the passive sonar. Simply turning it on DID NOT BOOT IT UP. There was a maintenance panel with a ton of indicator lamps, switches, and button on it. You had to punch in a bunch of crap just to get the thing to start up! I used to work on the AN/UYK-7 project at Sperry Univac in the Twin Cities. How did you like the "laptop"? That piece of big iron has a beast. The lights were the actual display in binary. You just needed to know how to read the address and the data in order to test ti. I saw a film of the battle-testing of the UYK-7. They bolt it to a heavy platform and turn it on. While it's running, a 1.5 ton hammer swings around and thumps the paltform. The computer needs to run successfully throughout these shocks. If it doesn't, it fails. Someone decided to hook up a 'modern' PC to the platform and run it through the test. Once that hammer hit, the monitor bounced off of the platform, the floppy drive was ejected from the box and every light went dead. Did you ever have to work with the tape drive? People, I ain't talking about mag tape. We're referring to the era of paper tape with the code punched into it. I also worked on the AN/UYK-43(42?) and AN/AYK-14 projects. |
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Remember Wang computers?? It looked and felt like an IBM pc. Even the OS looked like DOS, but when you try to retrieve data from a Wang disk on an IBM you get an error. This brings to mind an old joke... Q: "Who was the first computer guru?" A: "Eve...she held an Apple in one hand and Adam's Wang in the other" |