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Jul 28th, 2025
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Joined: Apr 2009
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Sidelock
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Sidelock
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And did we get a deal! Gary Bush 
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Joined: Dec 2001
Posts: 7,308 Likes: 614
Sidelock
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Sidelock
Joined: Dec 2001
Posts: 7,308 Likes: 614 |
Firearms imports, consignments ![[Linked Image from i.imgur.com]](https://i.imgur.com/Ez9oz9Rl.jpg)
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Joined: Sep 2008
Posts: 465
Sidelock
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Sidelock
Joined: Sep 2008
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Naw. Watson was telephone. I think it might be Alan Turing though.
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Joined: Sep 2008
Posts: 301
Sidelock
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Sidelock
Joined: Sep 2008
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Yeah, too bad it won't do square roots.
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Joined: Sep 2008
Posts: 1,153
Sidelock
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Sidelock
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Looks eerily like the Control Room of some of the early nukies but I assume it's not. Modern nuclear plant Control Rooms are more horse-shoe shaped. I thought Turing too.
Regards, Joe
You can lead a man to logic but you can't make him think. NRA Life since 1976. God bless America!
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Joined: May 2006
Posts: 625 Likes: 1
Sidelock
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Sidelock
Joined: May 2006
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That photograph looks like a late 1950's style computer room. Alan Turings computer at Bletchley Park, England was massive and because of it's size was called Colossus. Designed by a General Post Office research engineer, a Mr.Tommy Flowers. It was the worlds first electronic programmable computer. (Eat your heart out IBM) Back then (it was operational in 1941)there were no Silicon Chips, micro-processors etc. Heck, even transistors were a distant dream. Each computer contained several miles of wiring and more than 1000 valves which were the only form of switches in use in early 1940's. These computers (I believe there were ten in all) each filled a whole room. They were used to decipher the German and Japanese Military and Diplomatic codes in conjunction with a captured German 'Enigma' (Lorenze) code machines.
Harry
Last edited by Harry Eales; 09/22/11 02:24 AM.
Biology is the only science where multiplication can be achieved by division.
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Joined: Sep 2008
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Sidelock
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Sidelock
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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?
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Joined: Jan 2002
Posts: 2,264 Likes: 92
Sidelock
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Sidelock
Joined: Jan 2002
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OMG that brings back memories!!! I spent many, many, hours assembling Telex 6420 Tape Drives..... until.....they got into an anti-trust suit with IBM.....the only union job(UAW)I ever had. Man, did they do me a favor I got a 6 cent raise and an 11 cent raise and they took three hours of pay every month.....Whoooppiiddeeeedooo. I gave that place the hop after about a year.
Dodging lions and wasting time.....
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Joined: May 2011
Posts: 1,217 Likes: 28
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Sidelock
Joined: May 2011
Posts: 1,217 Likes: 28 |
It's almost certainly late 50s-early 60s. The linoleum tiles on the floor are a dead giveaway. And it's 2:30.
Your Iphone probably has several times the computing power of that room.
About 15 years ago I knew an older guy who was one of those natural-born engineers. I was telling him I had just bought a "new" pentium-powered desktop that upped my CPU speed to 90 MHz from my old XT/AT's 20 or so MHz and now I could do email over my wicked fast 28KHz dialup modem. He related that, in the early 60s, he'd worked on a contract for a government agency in Maryland where they'd built a 20 MHz computer. It needed a liquid cooling system to keep it running.
Last edited by Dave in Maine; 09/22/11 12:16 PM.
fiery, dependable, occasionally transcendent
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Joined: Sep 2008
Posts: 301
Sidelock
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Sidelock
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We chuckle but it got us to the moon and back.
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