5 ms·

This is quite sad. It seems the person who was tasked with doing something with the panels they had quickly gave up on doing anything with them other than makin

This is quite sad. It seems the person who was tasked with doing something with the panels they had quickly gave up on doing anything with them other than making them into a visual prop. It's not ENIAC any more, it's a bunch of DMX blinkenlights mounted on an ENIAC frame. If you're going to do that, what's the point of using the original hardware? That's just destroying it further. Making the whole machine work like it originally did is obviously not going to happen without, well, the rest of the machine. But we can fit a whole ENIAC in a fingertip these days. What I would have done is attempted to reverse engineer the logic of the available pieces, collected any existing documentation, and then made it do something. Real calculations. Wire it up to a virtual reproduction of the rest of the machine. Sure, maybe there isn't enough existing documentation to do it faithfully. Maybe it would all be a giant pile of guesses. But at least it would be computing something, even if it's just our best guess of how it was supposed to work, instead of just flashing lights randomly. It just feels really sad knowing that not a single one of those vacuum tubes is actually performing any logic functions, the way they wired it up.

crispyambulance 6y ago
I think it's really amazing to see old computers work. The Computer History Museum has managed to do that with some 50's and 60's era computers-- you can actually see them in action, teletype and everything. But it's really just a curiosity to have the physical machine literally running. It's merely a nostaghic artifact. We have photos, stories, documentation, and historians writing books and articles. That's what matters-- not the blinky lights even if they're running 70 year old "code" on an emulator or miraculously preserved vintage electronics. I think programming up an raspberry pi (or whatever) to run a mainframe emulator and hooking it up to old iron panels is something akin to building animatronic dinosaurs. It's great to do for some representative artifacts, but it can be overdone. Keeping the IBM 1401 running at the computer history museum is fine too. The room even smells great, it's a spectacle for geeks. It's feasible for as long as some old-timers can keep replacing the components that age-out. But at some point it's going to be a better idea to unplug the thing, remove the leaky caps, and keep the dust off it. It will be interesting what happens to VM's and Containers in the future. Are these things going to be preserved and displayed like a "brain-in-a-jar"? Will people in the future marvel at our convoluted code from 2020, our turgid (but quaint) frameworks. Will our API's be comparable to crazy victorian contraptions?
aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 6y ago
Is there even a source for replacement vacuum tubes? I thought they burned out on a consistent basis.
- jlg23 6y ago
  apparently there is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube#Vacuum_tubes_in_the_21st_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube#Vacuum_tubes_in_th...
- retrac 6y ago
  Most vacuum tube computers used extremely common pentode and dual triode tube types as their primary logic elements; ENIAC made extensive use of the 6SN7 for example, which is still manufactured today for guitar amplifiers. One caveat is they were a subtype specifically burned in and selected for computer reliability, which is not done anymore obviously. For the types where that's not an option, surprisingly (at least to me), most tubes commonly used historically still have ample new old stock tucked away in warehouses across the US and Europe. There was no major problem finding all the tubes required to recreate EDSAC in the UK: https://www.tnmoc.org/notes-from-the-museum/2013/1/9/production-begins-on-recreation-of-edsac https://www.tnmoc.org/notes-from-the-museum/2013/1/9/product... for example.

crispyambulance 6y ago

I think it's really amazing to see old computers work. The Computer History Museum has managed to do that with some 50's and 60's era computers-- you can actually see them in action, teletype and everything. But it's really just a curiosity to have the physical machine literally running. It's merely a nostaghic artifact. We have photos, stories, documentation, and historians writing books and articles. That's what matters-- not the blinky lights even if they're running 70 year old "code" on an emulator or miraculously preserved vintage electronics. I think programming up an raspberry pi (or whatever) to run a mainframe emulator and hooking it up to old iron panels is something akin to building animatronic dinosaurs. It's great to do for some representative artifacts, but it can be overdone. Keeping the IBM 1401 running at the computer history museum is fine too. The room even smells great, it's a spectacle for geeks. It's feasible for as long as some old-timers can keep replacing the components that age-out. But at some point it's going to be a better idea to unplug the thing, remove the leaky caps, and keep the dust off it. It will be interesting what happens to VM's and Containers in the future. Are these things going to be preserved and displayed like a "brain-in-a-jar"? Will people in the future marvel at our convoluted code from 2020, our turgid (but quaint) frameworks. Will our API's be comparable to crazy victorian contraptions?

aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 6y ago

Is there even a source for replacement vacuum tubes? I thought they burned out on a consistent basis.

jlg23 6y ago
apparently there is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube#Vacuum_tubes_in_the_21st_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube#Vacuum_tubes_in_th...
retrac 6y ago
Most vacuum tube computers used extremely common pentode and dual triode tube types as their primary logic elements; ENIAC made extensive use of the 6SN7 for example, which is still manufactured today for guitar amplifiers. One caveat is they were a subtype specifically burned in and selected for computer reliability, which is not done anymore obviously. For the types where that's not an option, surprisingly (at least to me), most tubes commonly used historically still have ample new old stock tucked away in warehouses across the US and Europe. There was no major problem finding all the tubes required to recreate EDSAC in the UK: https://www.tnmoc.org/notes-from-the-museum/2013/1/9/production-begins-on-recreation-of-edsac https://www.tnmoc.org/notes-from-the-museum/2013/1/9/product... for example.