4 ms·

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943

by elymar 8y ago

Dudemann 8y ago
That might have been right at the time.
ascar 8y ago
1889: “Fooling around with alternating current (AC) is just a waste of time. Nobody will use it, ever.” — Thomas Edison.
- walrus01 8y ago
  2019: I have a 100% DC powered datacenter, but the power certainly gets to its location via AC.
  - zuron7 8y ago
    Transmission could be done via DC too, and there are quite a few benefits to it. The only field left to conquer is generation of electricity, looks like that's going to be in AC.
    - walrus01 8y ago
      It is, but rather difficult and expensive for short to medium distances. Submarine power cables are often HVDC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie
      - howard941 8y ago
        Great article. The thing's grounding system is lustworthy: The Sylmar grounding system is a line of 24 silicon-iron alloy electrodes submerged in the Pacific Ocean at Will Rogers State Beach[4] suspended in concrete enclosures about one meter above the ocean floor. The grounding system at Celilo consists of 1,067 cast iron anodes buried in a two-foot trench of petroleum coke, which behaves as an electrode, arranged in a ring of 2.02 mi (3,250.87 m) circumference at Rice Flats (near Rice, Oregon), which is 6.6 mi (10.6 km) SSE of Celilo.
        gtdawg 8y ago
        Incredible! I've always been fascinated when driving by the Sylmar station (many times in my life) and never knew that I was driving by connecting infrastructure when on PCH in that area. And even more interesting is they are replacing/replaced it! https://www.circlingthenews.com/terminus-of-sylmar-ground-return-system-being-replaced/ https://www.circlingthenews.com/terminus-of-sylmar-ground-re...
      - Tempest1981 8y ago
        Cool! Which led me further down the rabbit hole: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current - HVDC uses voltages between 100 kV and 1,500 kV. - HVDC can be cheaper for 500+ mile runs - HVDC allows power transmission between unsynchronized AC transmission systems - Recent advances make UHVDC feasible (800kV+)
        Ruphin 8y ago
        Great excuse to get introduced to this wonderful engineering youtube channel (no affiliation) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFQG9kuXSxg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFQG9kuXSxg
    - garmaine 8y ago
      What benefits? The downsides are massive resistive losses.
      - repiret 8y ago
        That depends entirely on the voltage. AC won because transformers are relatively simple and can change AC voltage, but we can now build stuff to change AC voltage too.
        hexane360 8y ago
        Don't forget that three phase allows for three conductors to carry the power of three pairs of single phase conductors.
        wl 8y ago
        Alternatively, skin effect limits the amount of AC current you can throw over a single conductor. With DC, you can make your conductors arbitrarily thick and you'll use the whole thing.
        i_am_proteus 8y ago
        Three-phase AC also allows for very electromechanically simple generators and motors. Industrial electrical loads have traditionally been (and often still are) rotating machinery, putting three-phase at an advantage.
        yholio 8y ago
        That's not entirely true. Any load imbalance on the phases is resolved through the null, connected to earth at both ends of the line. You can do the same with three single phase lines, although you wound need a massive earthing system with low resistance. Or you could build a 2 wire (or 4, 6 ...) DC line with complementary polarity that would carry more power due to skin effects. If the negative and positive loads are balanced, the currents though the earthing wire cancel out.
        yholio 8y ago
- NegativeLatency 8y ago
  Edison made money off of selling DC infrastructure though.
ghaff 8y ago
There’s no evidence he ever said that though.
rasz 8y ago
"Brilliant" man, 1937 recipient of der Fuhrer's "The Merit Cross of the German Eagle with Star", granted to 'honor foreign nationals who made themselves deserving of the German Reich.' for selling IBM tabulation machines, technology which enabled genocide.
southerndrift 8y ago
Think of data centers as huge mainframes and we will soon come close.
- lsc 8y ago
  > Think of data centers as huge mainframes and we will soon come close. I... kinda doubt it. All of the really big players have access to markets that are willing to pay huge margins. there are a lot of smaller players that would be happy to sell you compute at 75% the price of amazon, and bandwidth at 1/10th the price of amazon. Yeah, the big customers are happy paying the premium, but there are plenty of small customers that will buy service from a smaller player if it means a big discount.
  - jpatokal 8y ago
    It's going to be increasingly difficult to compete with the big players' economies of scale though. There's a reason we don't buy cars from the neighbor's factory or generate our own electricity these days.
    - lsc 8y ago
      like... half the people I know who own a single family home generate a good portion of their own electricity. Sometimes centralization helps efficiency, it's true, but sometimes the opposite, decentralization helps, too... it sure looks like for peak-load in sunny areas, decentralized power generation is cheaper. I think that for commodity compute, the big players are not a lot more efficient than the big hardware manufacturers. Go to a supermicro, a foxcon, or other ODM server manufacturer, and you'd be surprised how cheap it is to buy actual hardware. Small companies will scrap for margins that the big players, so far, at least, have laughed at, because so far, most of the market seems to be okay paying these large margins. (I used to be one of those small companies scrapping for those low margins; I am not happily and much more renumeratively employed by a big player, outside of their cloud department) I personally think that long term, smaller players or in-house hosting will be the way to go for your 'base load' compute resource. I think that paying the margins of the big players makes a lot more sense for your 'peak load' But, of course, we don't know yet; none of this will shake out until the next serious economic downturn. There isn't a lot of pressure to save money when the economy looks like this.
bklaasen 8y ago
Not Thomas Watson, but A. S. Householder[1] in Nicholas Metropolis et al "A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century"[2]: https://mobile.twitter.com/benklaasen/status/874543989004881921 https://mobile.twitter.com/benklaasen/status/874543989004881... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alston_Scott_Householder https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alston_Scott_Householder [2] https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=578384 https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=578384

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943

by elymar 8y ago

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943

Dudemann 8y ago

That might have been right at the time.

ascar 8y ago

1889: “Fooling around with alternating current (AC) is just a waste of time. Nobody will use it, ever.” — Thomas Edison.

walrus01 8y ago
2019: I have a 100% DC powered datacenter, but the power certainly gets to its location via AC.
- zuron7 8y ago
  Transmission could be done via DC too, and there are quite a few benefits to it. The only field left to conquer is generation of electricity, looks like that's going to be in AC.
  - walrus01 8y ago
    It is, but rather difficult and expensive for short to medium distances. Submarine power cables are often HVDC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie
    - howard941 8y ago
      Great article. The thing's grounding system is lustworthy: The Sylmar grounding system is a line of 24 silicon-iron alloy electrodes submerged in the Pacific Ocean at Will Rogers State Beach[4] suspended in concrete enclosures about one meter above the ocean floor. The grounding system at Celilo consists of 1,067 cast iron anodes buried in a two-foot trench of petroleum coke, which behaves as an electrode, arranged in a ring of 2.02 mi (3,250.87 m) circumference at Rice Flats (near Rice, Oregon), which is 6.6 mi (10.6 km) SSE of Celilo.
      - gtdawg 8y ago
        Incredible! I've always been fascinated when driving by the Sylmar station (many times in my life) and never knew that I was driving by connecting infrastructure when on PCH in that area. And even more interesting is they are replacing/replaced it! https://www.circlingthenews.com/terminus-of-sylmar-ground-return-system-being-replaced/ https://www.circlingthenews.com/terminus-of-sylmar-ground-re...
    - Tempest1981 8y ago
      Cool! Which led me further down the rabbit hole: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current - HVDC uses voltages between 100 kV and 1,500 kV. - HVDC can be cheaper for 500+ mile runs - HVDC allows power transmission between unsynchronized AC transmission systems - Recent advances make UHVDC feasible (800kV+)
      - Ruphin 8y ago
        Great excuse to get introduced to this wonderful engineering youtube channel (no affiliation) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFQG9kuXSxg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFQG9kuXSxg
  - garmaine 8y ago
    What benefits? The downsides are massive resistive losses.
    - repiret 8y ago
      That depends entirely on the voltage. AC won because transformers are relatively simple and can change AC voltage, but we can now build stuff to change AC voltage too.
      - hexane360 8y ago
        Don't forget that three phase allows for three conductors to carry the power of three pairs of single phase conductors.
        wl 8y ago
        Alternatively, skin effect limits the amount of AC current you can throw over a single conductor. With DC, you can make your conductors arbitrarily thick and you'll use the whole thing.
        i_am_proteus 8y ago
        Three-phase AC also allows for very electromechanically simple generators and motors. Industrial electrical loads have traditionally been (and often still are) rotating machinery, putting three-phase at an advantage.
        yholio 8y ago
        That's not entirely true. Any load imbalance on the phases is resolved through the null, connected to earth at both ends of the line. You can do the same with three single phase lines, although you wound need a massive earthing system with low resistance. Or you could build a 2 wire (or 4, 6 ...) DC line with complementary polarity that would carry more power due to skin effects. If the negative and positive loads are balanced, the currents though the earthing wire cancel out.
      - yholio 8y ago
NegativeLatency 8y ago
Edison made money off of selling DC infrastructure though.

ghaff 8y ago

There’s no evidence he ever said that though.

rasz 8y ago

"Brilliant" man, 1937 recipient of der Fuhrer's "The Merit Cross of the German Eagle with Star", granted to 'honor foreign nationals who made themselves deserving of the German Reich.' for selling IBM tabulation machines, technology which enabled genocide.

southerndrift 8y ago

Think of data centers as huge mainframes and we will soon come close.

lsc 8y ago
> Think of data centers as huge mainframes and we will soon come close. I... kinda doubt it. All of the really big players have access to markets that are willing to pay huge margins. there are a lot of smaller players that would be happy to sell you compute at 75% the price of amazon, and bandwidth at 1/10th the price of amazon. Yeah, the big customers are happy paying the premium, but there are plenty of small customers that will buy service from a smaller player if it means a big discount.
- jpatokal 8y ago
  It's going to be increasingly difficult to compete with the big players' economies of scale though. There's a reason we don't buy cars from the neighbor's factory or generate our own electricity these days.
  - lsc 8y ago
    like... half the people I know who own a single family home generate a good portion of their own electricity. Sometimes centralization helps efficiency, it's true, but sometimes the opposite, decentralization helps, too... it sure looks like for peak-load in sunny areas, decentralized power generation is cheaper. I think that for commodity compute, the big players are not a lot more efficient than the big hardware manufacturers. Go to a supermicro, a foxcon, or other ODM server manufacturer, and you'd be surprised how cheap it is to buy actual hardware. Small companies will scrap for margins that the big players, so far, at least, have laughed at, because so far, most of the market seems to be okay paying these large margins. (I used to be one of those small companies scrapping for those low margins; I am not happily and much more renumeratively employed by a big player, outside of their cloud department) I personally think that long term, smaller players or in-house hosting will be the way to go for your 'base load' compute resource. I think that paying the margins of the big players makes a lot more sense for your 'peak load' But, of course, we don't know yet; none of this will shake out until the next serious economic downturn. There isn't a lot of pressure to save money when the economy looks like this.

bklaasen 8y ago

Not Thomas Watson, but A. S. Householder[1] in Nicholas Metropolis et al "A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century"[2]: https://mobile.twitter.com/benklaasen/status/874543989004881921 https://mobile.twitter.com/benklaasen/status/874543989004881... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alston_Scott_Householder https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alston_Scott_Householder [2] https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=578384 https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=578384