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And did we get a deal!

Gary Bush


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Is that Watson?


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Naw. Watson was telephone. I think it might be Alan Turing though.

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Yeah, too bad it won't do square roots.

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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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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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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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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.


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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.

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We chuckle but it got us to the moon and back.

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