W.O'Boogie
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W. O'Boogie
Stumbled onto this in my readings.....interesting
50 Years of Computers
- Thread starter W.O'Boogie
- Start date
Dear "not Kevin":
In 1970 after getting out of Valley Forge Millitary Hospital, I got a couple of months of convelescent leave. I went to work for the administrative data processing unit at Penn State. Every night at midnight, they turned over an IBM 360/50 mainframe computer to me until 8 am for special programming projects. This was maybe a million buck computer (maybe 5-6 million in today's money).
It was less powerful and capable than the 2nd generation IBM PC'2...
In 1970 after getting out of Valley Forge Millitary Hospital, I got a couple of months of convelescent leave. I went to work for the administrative data processing unit at Penn State. Every night at midnight, they turned over an IBM 360/50 mainframe computer to me until 8 am for special programming projects. This was maybe a million buck computer (maybe 5-6 million in today's money).
It was less powerful and capable than the 2nd generation IBM PC'2...
AdamZ
Touchdown! Greaser!
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Adam Zucker
Before he passed away I represented J. Presper Eckert. Anyone know that name?
flyingcheesehead
Touchdown! Greaser!
AdamZ said:
Yeah.
Wow. !
How far we have come... Here I sit, in a truck in the middle of nowhere (AKA Cedar Springs, GA) working on a computer thousands if not millions of times more powerful (in fact, most of the I/O controllers on current computers are more powerful than the first computers were) and a tiny fraction of the size of ENIAC. I'm connected to the Internet, a vast group of millions of other powerful computers, via a wireless connection through a cellular phone that itself is vastly more powerful than those early computers. In fact, the computer that controls the truck's systems is probably more powerful than ENIAC was.
Truly amazing.
fgcason
En-Route
AdamZ said:
Ummm. ummm. I know this...even though I didn't take the computer history class. Very vague recollection.
I could be COMPLETELY wrong but IIRC someone big in the very very early digital computers. Univac maybe? Original inventor? I'm thinking something digital before Univac but I can't remember what now..binary something or other. BINAC?
IBM 360/370 mainframe. My programs, including the machine code stuff, ran on that monster. It took up a whopping portion of the first floor of the administration building. The air conditioner for it was the second floor.
That mainframe was soooo cool.
The little computer I'm typing this on right now can blow that thing completely out of the water...and for good measure, blow the water out of the water to add injury to insult.
Whopping Mb and now Gb SD cards the size of a postage stamp...and that's small to woopie doo ho hum capacity stuff nowadays. I remember a room full of the big washing machine drives with platters...and tape drives, and punch card machines.
If you told me then that I could drop a handful of 128mb of anything in the grass today and lose it, I'd have called you a big fat liar. I apparently didn't have much of an imagination back then when it came to computers...