Photo of the Day
Posted by Current_Yellow7722@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 18 comments
Posted by Current_Yellow7722@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 18 comments
BudTugglie@reddit
A modern 1TB drive holds about as much as 6000 reels of tape on these drives.
RenderedMeat@reddit
It funny when you think about it that we had giant power hungry single computers that took up full rooms and had less than the computing power of a modern cellphone, but now we have warehouses with thousands of super high performance computers that can each do billions more calculations per second but are sucking away all our electricity and water.
Tartan-Pepper6093@reddit
This. My nagging question is when will these thousands of high performance computers be miniaturized to a fraction of the original size, leaving lots of that space and warehouses wasted or abandoned? Fifteen years? Ten? Memories of $50,000 Sun 2 workstations in 1985, big as refrigerators, dumpster-food by 1991 replaced with shoebox-sized Sparcstations, which in turn were rendered useless by dirt-cheap Pentiums by the late 90s. 40 years on, a sub-$1000 MacBook Neo with a motherboard the size of a postcard is more than 1000x more powerful than that Sun 2. If that kind of miniaturization continues, a lot of these warehouses are going to be e-waste in 5, 10 years max, right?
RenderedMeat@reddit
They already have been cycling servers for many years now. What happens to the old servers depends on the company and the hardware. Some is resold. Much is sent to an e waste recovery firm. A lot of the precious metals are recovered. But it certainly has an environmental impact.
We definitely need to slow the fuck down on the data centers being pushed out now. Artificial need created by greed.
CoderDevo@reddit
I don't think the computer is in this picture.
These are all I/O peripherals and the operator console.
The actual computer must be behind the tape drives on the left half of the photo.
RenderedMeat@reddit
Still doesn’t change my point.
8BitResseRtiB8@reddit
Wonder what happened to all these units ive never seen one for sale
Bikrdude@reddit
There is a web page with a story of a boy who set one up. Ibm wanted 10k/ month to license the os but they relented for his project.
Among other issues they needed to run extra power because a home circuit is not enough
8BitResseRtiB8@reddit
Ohh ok that makes sense
Bikrdude@reddit
Found it https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1526238740799736&vanity=IBM.
sarajevo81@reddit
I wonder what people actually used that machinery for.
Bikrdude@reddit
Mostly managing business transactions
ConstructionSafe2814@reddit
Very cool, can somebody perhaps elaborate on what sort of systems I'm looking at?
Far-Contest4087@reddit
Looks like IBM 7090 from 60s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7090
Halberdin@reddit
I found the console: IBM 7074 (released 1960): IBM 7070 - Wikipedia
Future-Side4440@reddit
This would be used for billing and banking systems. it looks very impressive, but actually the computer has almost no memory as we would understand it and so it’s doing very simple and boring repetitive accounting tasks.
Customers would send money with a punched card with their account information.
An office secretary would add the payment to the card, then the stack gets fed into a reader.
They run a batch job on the computer, reading the cards one by one and collecting sequential data on the various tapes.
This customer‘s account is delinquent. This customer‘s account is paying off something in installments. This customer failed to pay the full amount and still owes us more. This customer died. Can’t find this customer, check if card is damaged.
Then, once they process all the cards, they run a report on the data collected on each tape, and potentially combine data that is spread across multiple tapes.
PBRStreetgang1979@reddit
I can smell and hear that room.
Academic-Shoulder308@reddit
classic