doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion Classic & Custom Single Barreled Sporting Rifles @ doublegunshop.com A NEW COMPUTER at the Bush house

Quote Ryan McNabb.

What was their approximate computing power, Harry? Is there a way to compare them to a modern PC, for instance - in megabites of storage capacity, or computations per second, that sort of thing? Unquote.

Hello Ryan,

I'm no computer geek but a good guide to Colossus can be found here:-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer

Enjoy,

Harry

This photograph of an early computer system was found in a lifetime accumulation of family and many other unrelated pictures.

Attached to the picture was the following description:

"World-wide weapon and engine management by OCAMA's Data Processing Center is accomplished with large scale 7980 and 7050 electronic data processing computers. The engine accounting program, for example, provides a current status report of all Air Force engines, valued at approximately $6.5 billion.

Gary Bush

P.S. We really did get a new computer.

I work IT for a living. There is a method of comparison for Supercomputers they are rated using by teraFLOPS on the MP-Linpack. A teraFLOP is one trillion floating point operations per second.

To give an example, the Sandia Asci Red supercomputer, built in 1996 was rated a 1.5 teraFLOPS. Today, that machine can be outdone by a Sony Playstation.

Judging by the photo with the array of tape drives, etc. The sysop is sitting at a desk with keyboards and monitors, those were later developments. Very early machines had only card readers and printers. OCAMA was Oklahoma City Air Materiel Area. This was a data center for the Air Force that was an offshoot of the Rand Corp. Circa 1965. Your watch has more computing power.

Pete