3 ms·

They look so clean did they get that way through lack of use or were they restored I wonder? I can't imagine the night janitorial crew giving a spritz and wipi

• marshray 15y ago
  I'm sure there was some restoration, but I thought leaving the yellowed note on the phone with the General's number was a nice touch. Those machines were pretty darned expensive. They were all taken very good care of. Except for the paper-handling equipment, almost anything that involved opening the cabinet would probably have been done by IBM personnel. The military was also known for keeping just their ordinary stuff clean. It surely went double for the air defense computers. Top brass from the Pentagon were likely dropping by for a tour on a regular basis. In the years following WWII as one of the only large industrial nations that had not been bombed to smithereens, the amount of capital the US had to spend on this kind of thing just boggles the imagination. Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/FSQ-7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/FSQ-7 : The AN/FSQ-7 computer contained 55,000 vacuum tubes, occupied 0.5 acres (2,000 m2) of of floor space, weighed 275 tons, and used up to three megawatts of power. The fifty-two AN/FSQ-7s remain the physically largest computers ever built, and will likely hold that record in the future.