7 ms·
The largest computer ever built
- azov 14y agoIf you're in Bay Area, it (well, some pieces of it) is on display in Computer History Museum - http://www.computerhistory.org/VirtualVisibleStorage/artifact_frame.php?tax_id=02.02.02.00 http://www.computerhistory.org/VirtualVisibleStorage/artifac...
- mef 14y agoThanks for the link. This is mind-blowing: The software was written by The Rand Corporation and the System Development Corporation (SDC) and employed about 20% of the world’s programmers at the peak of the project.
- smutticus 14y agoThis web design is terrible. I expect better from the Computer History Museum. I tried Chrome, Safari and Firefox on OS X and it looks terrible in all of them.
- awjr 14y agoReally? I went there, was able to clearly see a well written article, not cluttered with anything distracting that gave me the information I needed, allowing me to focus 100% on the content.
- dmd 14y agoHe's referring to the Computer History Museum link in the parent, not the SAGE article.
- bostonpete 14y agoNot sure why you were downvoted -- I agree. The text scrolls off the right side of my browser (maybe b/c I'm not full-screen)? It drives me nuts when sites assume a minimum width of your browser, but this example is especially severe.
- rachelbythebay 14y ago"Our grandfathers knew about fault tolerance" Just our grandfathers, and not our grandparents as a whole?
- cperciva 14y agoGiven the time period in question, I think it's quite likely that all the people working on this project were men.
- auctiontheory 14y agoWell, our grandmothers had to tolerate our grandfathers' faults. That's probably enough to ask.
- seanmcdirmid 14y agoUnless your grandmother was Rear Admiral "Amazing" Grace Hopper?
- cperciva 14y agoI did consider her, but during the period in question she was working at UNIVAC on compilers.
- seanmcdirmid 14y agoI was fighting the generalization, not the details.
- Domenic_S 14y ago"Grandfather" also means 'ancestor'. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/grandfather http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/grandfather
- rachelbythebay 14y agoOkay, miss.
- jessriedel 14y ago> What are the manageable pieces needed to make quantum computing or deriving all electrical power from the sun a reality? I don?t know, and I don?t know of anybody else who does: therefore, such things do not count as legitimate long term projects. Boy, that wording rubs me the wrong way. This stuff is known as "research". Yes, that makes it highly uncertain. No, that does not make it an illegitimate project.
- drcube 14y agoYeah, they're legitimate "research" projects, not "engineering" projects. No usable device is expected to be produced and put into service at the end. People funding that research are buying knowledge, not useful systems.
- alan_cx 14y agoIf long term projects can be made obsolete by their deployment time, then on what basis can long term project actually happen. What ever you do, it's a gamble.
- rbanffy 14y agoThis is why "release early, release often" was invented.
- chiph 14y ago"Core Memory" .. that brings back a memory. I worked on an unrelated system while in the USAF that had 512 bytes of core memory. We had a problem where the data was getting corrupted some of the time, particularly on a message indicator byte that disrupted flow control. After a day of oscilloscope work, it turned out that one core in the array had gone bad, and it just happened to be in the "wrong" place. The system had been designed in the mid 1960's, and this particular core array had been running since 1970 or so, and this was 1985. So 14 or so years of continuous uptime. There's something to be said about building hardware at the macro size, not the micro size. ;)
- f4stjack 14y agoImagine a beowulf cluster of these...
- sixothree 14y ago3-112-0_Theory_Of_Programming_Apr59.pdf is quite interesting.