Comments on: Room-sized computers, tended by labcoat priests, narrated in cheerful midwestern tones, with uptempo orchestral music

By: Tore Sinding Bekkedal

Tore Sinding Bekkedal — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 04:41:00 +0000

It is the IBM RAMAC disk drive. Considering the whole thing stored on the order of 5-10MB, the density wasn’t all that great.

By: Tore Sinding Bekkedal

Tore Sinding Bekkedal — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 04:40:00 +0000

It might have been the IBM 305 RAMAC being delivered to Freia, the chocolate factory.

The capacity was not the staggering part, the random access was. a 2400′ magtape at 1600BPI easily dwarfed it. But it made a hell of a difference in terms of turnaround time on things like inventory control – which was what they were often used for.

Note that the disk was tightly connected to the computer it was sold with, as a kind of half-way between the IBM unit-record equipment (card sorter, card calculator, tabulator, accounting machines, etcetera) and computing.

I recall the CPU architecture as being pretty zany.

By: Bloo

Bloo — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 03:32:00 +0000

We once had programs which would draw things (usually large letters) using the holes on punched paper tape as ‘pixels’

By: Evan Koblentz

Evan Koblentz — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 01:43:00 +0000

The computers in this video — MOBIDIC, BASICPAC, and COMPAC — were all part of the Army Signal Corp’s FIELDATA program. FIELDATA was the predecessor to ASCII. It was designed (along with MOBIDIC) at the Evans Signal Lab, in Belmar, New Jersey. As it happens, that laboratory in the 1990s closed and the campus became a museum called the InfoAge Science History Learning Center. Among other exhibits, it contains a computer museum, where there’s even a small piece of a MOBIDIC on display. The museum also hosts the Vintage Computer Festival East. Its next edition is May 5-6 — learn more about http://www.vintage.org/2012/east/.

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 21:26:00 +0000

Not that much worse than Super 8.

By: Culturedropout

Culturedropout — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:56:00 +0000

Did somebody say Altair 8800 emulator?

http://incolor.inetnebr.com/bill_r/computer_simulators.htm

By: Culturedropout

Culturedropout — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:54:00 +0000

I think the one guy was downloading porn on paper tape. “When I was your age, our pr0n was delivered in 8-pixel-wide strips that we had to paste together. We got paper cuts on our junk like you would not _believe, and we were *thankful* for it!”

By: Ian Dahlberg

Ian Dahlberg — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:18:00 +0000

If you’re ever in the California Bay Area (Mountain View to be specific) I highly recommend visiting the Computer History Museum, where you can see these behemoths in person:
http://www.computerhistory.org/

By: James Hotelling

James Hotelling — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:05:00 +0000

Nothing says “the future!” like syncopated marimba.

By: Mark Dow

Mark Dow — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 16:55:00 +0000

I like the caution sticker. I wonder if anyone got a hernia lifting it inappropriately.

I’m going to put the biggest Caution sticker I can manage onto my 4g/4GB archaic thumb drive.

By: soylent_plaid

soylent_plaid — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 15:58:00 +0000

You can wear them in your office if you wish. After all, you’re operating a machine that’s literally millions of times more powerful than the ones these fine gentlemen were rocking, so you should probably have the right equipment.

By: desiredusername

desiredusername — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 15:53:00 +0000

I’ll bet half of those programs are linear programming algorithms.

By: nixiebunny

nixiebunny — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 15:29:00 +0000

RAMAC 305 or similar. It was IBM’s first hard disk drive, storing 5 megabytes, which was a lot of data for 1956.

By: Terry Border

Terry Border — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 13:34:00 +0000

Exactly. I know this may sound blasphemous, but even the mighty iPhone will look naive and primitive in just a few years. The Walkman of the 2010′s that we couldn’t live without.

By: Yacko

Yacko — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 13:12:00 +0000

I think it is behind some clear curved wall, glass? In the bad old days, people forget, hard drives had removable data packs.

By: Noctilucent Studios

Noctilucent Studios — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 13:11:00 +0000

Whatever happened to lab coats?

By: Work_Watch_Buy_Repeat

Work_Watch_Buy_Repeat — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 13:05:00 +0000

Based on the applications being discussed (e.g. “fire support”), the context of this video is a discussion of early military computers, promising to streamline and automate the business of killing. Well, Mission Accomplished!

By: KillianOP

KillianOP — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 12:57:00 +0000

“Labcoat priests” in those pre-enlightenment Dark Ages on tech. That music could be fantastic for productivity, although perhaps only for building candy steam trains.

By: digi_owl

digi_owl — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 12:57:00 +0000

on the topic of drives:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b4/IBM3380DiskDriveModule.agr.jpg

looks like it could double as a warp drive component or something…

By: digi_owl

digi_owl — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 12:55:00 +0000

A Altair 8800 emulator perhaps?

Interestingly, Microsofts first product was a paper tape delivered Basic interpreter/compiler for said computer.

By: digi_owl

digi_owl — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 12:54:00 +0000

I recall finding a image of such a drive being delivered to a Norwegian computing facility, by way of a DC-3 and a forklift, some time in the 60s. I think it had the staggering, for the time, capacity of 10MB.

By: digi_owl

digi_owl — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 12:50:00 +0000

here we go, courtesy of wikipedia:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b4/IBM_350_RAMAC.jpg

Well crap, that was already posted…

By: digi_owl

digi_owl — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 12:49:00 +0000

Given the size, it could probably ignore anything smaller than a bumblebee without blinking.

By: Petzl

Petzl — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 11:40:00 +0000

Best line ever, from the Wikipedia entry:“This first ever disk drive was initially cancelled by the IBM Board of Directors because of its threat to the IBM punch card business….”

By: peterkvt80

peterkvt80 — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 11:23:00 +0000

Looks like an IBM Disk File. 50 platters and only one pair of heads! Total capacity 5MB.

By: Tynam

Tynam — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 11:09:00 +0000

Thank goodness our future tech-savvy grandchildren will make fun of us.

By: Marktech

Marktech — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 10:01:00 +0000

Looks like this sort of thing.

By: jerryeast

jerryeast — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 09:48:00 +0000

Thank goodness we as a planet have reached the absolute pinnacle of human knowledge and machine capability and will not have to worry about being made fun of by future tech-savvy generations

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 09:40:00 +0000

The first scene looks more like the mighty Wurlitzer organ.

By: Alpacaman

Alpacaman — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 09:24:00 +0000

I was thinking it was storage of some kind, but it is all exposed looking so I figured it wasn’t magnetic. Maybe it works as a big spinning punch card?