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This promotional film made for Western Union shows some very cool "high tech" equipment from before the computer age. The machines for automatically transmittin
by eigenvalue 3y ago
This promotional film made for Western Union shows some very cool "high tech" equipment from before the computer age. The machines for automatically transmitting and decoding telegrams, the desktop "fax" machine for a business executive, and in particular, this very impressive automatic "store and forward" switching machine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_55-A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_55-A
This last one presaged many ideas which later appeared in the design for the Arpanet, and the analysis of queuing delays with the system was part of the Phd dissertation by Len Kleinrock, who helped come up with many of the ideas that contributed to the invention of the internet.
It seems like these earlier systems are not really talked about much anymore since they quickly became obsolete as a result of digital computers, but it's fascinating to think about what they could have evolved into had the transistor never been invented.
- bombcar 3y agoThe one of those I love the best is analog firing computers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_I_Fire_Control_Computer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_I_Fire_Control_Computer
- eigenvalue 3y agoYes, these are awesome. There is another one of these old films about them which is a great explainer: https://youtu.be/s1i-dnAH9Y4 https://youtu.be/s1i-dnAH9Y4
- Animats 3y agoMessage switching did evolve. The next step for Western Union was InfoMaster, using RCA mainframe computers in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and San Francisco. There was a Western Union international gateway in Mawah, NJ, with UNIVAC mainframe computers. The best known successor to Plan-55A was Sendmail, which is a store and forward message switch for email. It serves the same basic function, forwarding entire messages as a unit from station to station until they reach the delivery point.