3 ms·
I seem to recall reading in either Kahn's or Sebag-Montefiore's book on Bletchley Park that one early failure mode of the tape was that it was run through the r
by lb1lf 8y ago
I seem to recall reading in either Kahn's or Sebag-Montefiore's book on Bletchley Park that one early failure mode of the tape was that it was run through the reader at a fast enough pace to occasionally catch fire.
Oops.
- Animats 8y agoBasic problem of early computing: no good memory devices. IBM had electronic arithmetic before WWII, as an experimental tube multiplier. But nobody had a memory device that didn't require lots of parts per digit or bit. Hence cards and paper tape.
- mirimir 8y agoI had an old friend who worked with 60s era mainframes. You had a decent enough CPU, but no memory. And very slow storage. So you worked out some set of instructions with total execution time comparable to storage I/O. And put that into ~firmware. Then you read data from one device, and wrote data to another device. And kept repeating that, with other instruction sets, until you were done. That's not very different from current usage. Except that most intermediate results go into various sorts of memory. Or /tmp devices, if there's too much data for memory. And at the CPU level, instruction sets are just about as small. But the point is that one could process ~huge amounts of data. Many GiB, as I recall. Just very slowly, with lots of thrashing tape. And now one can use the same approach, except with clusters. And process humongous amounts of data.