Slashdot Log In
50 Year Old Computer Still Going
Posted by
chrisd
on Thu Dec 12, 2002 04:08 AM
from the not-a-laptop dept.
from the not-a-laptop dept.
The Angry Mick writes "Geek.com is running a blurb on a 50 year old CSIRAC computer that is apparently still functional, if lurking in an Australian museum. Sporting a whopping 2K of RAM and screaming along at a blistering 300 khz(!) it proves the adage that they really don't make 'em like they used to . . ." Yes, because if they did, they'd be really, really slow.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
50 Year Old Computer Still Going
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 293 comments
(Spill at 50!) | Index Only
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Wow... (Score:3, Funny)
Imagine... (Score:5, Funny)
built to last (Score:5, Interesting)
It wasn't that reliable... (Score:5, Funny)
On one occasion, they gave a demo to an organisation called the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE), but apparently a memory error occurred and the thing printed "CSIRAC welcomes the members of the IRA) :)
Re:It wasn't that reliable... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:built to last (Score:4, Funny)
Haven't been married before have you? (Pictures of ex wife seeing my junky old 486 sitting in the corner and exclaiming, "What's that???" flash through my mind) Basically you can kiss anything over 10 years old goodbye (with the possible exception of family heirlooms studded with diamonds).
Running eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
By reading the horde of nested articles, I got the impression that the machine hasn't run in decades, and probably would not if powered.
Correct me if I'm wrong. But please quote a piece that says it is actually running now.
Re:Running eh? (Score:5, Informative)
The original source [abc.net.au] even says it cannot run.
It was the hairbrained TheInquirer [theinquirer.net] article writer who somehow got the impression that it was still running.
Re:Running eh? (Score:5, Informative)
Someone's comment, your quote. It's actually more likely that if they were to power it up/were powering it up, they apply voltage gradually to allow the electrolytic capacitors to re-form and the getter rings/compounds [demon.co.uk] in the thermionic devices to restore vacuum.
It's not unusual for thermionic equipment to survive long periods of time without use. There is still radio equipment from this era running strongly in museums and private collections and, dare I say, in everyday use. The odd capacitor may fail short once in a while, resistors may fail _high_ (they gradually increase resistance with time - a knownphenomenon) or valves/tubes may lose a heater or go "soft" but I think it's stretching the imagination somewhat to expect it to burst into flames.
Incidentally, designers from this era often made their chassis live (high potential with respect to ground) so the only thing I'd expect to catch fire would be the young PFY geek leaning on it to get a better view of the thermionics powering up and starting to glow...;o)
That has more ram than my present CPU has (Score:3, Funny)
Although I have the advantage of having a whopping 64k of ROM. I only have to use the RAM for my data. I would expect that computer also has to store the program binary in the 2k. Overlays, anyone?
Lately I've been finding it worth my time to spend a few hours recoding some functions in order to shave just a few bytes off their stack usage.
Kids these days, assuming everyone's got 128 megabytes for their application. They just don't code 'em like they used to.
Re:That has more ram than my present CPU has (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't even notice unless an app is using over 100M (technically, 100,000KB, but who's counting?)
But it sure would be nice if Windows would notice I have gobs of RAM lying around and start using it for something productive like caching the disk subsystem, rather than the other way around. There is no excuse for a system with >512M of free RAM paging to disk! What ass-backwards VM got stuck into Windows, anyway?
Impressive (Score:3, Insightful)
Commodore released the 64 in 1982, this puts it at 20 years of age. That's 30 years between these two machines. When did Moore make that law again?
Yikes, imagine what the computer world will be like in 30 years time! Assuming MS haven't screwed it up for everyone.
Re:Impressive // dollars? (Score:5, Informative)
Btw, C64's feature 64kB which is 32 times 2kB, so at least memory size doubled five times in 20 years, that is: it doubled every four years.
--
In theory there is no difference between practice and theory. But in practice there is -- Jan L.A. van Snepscheut
Re:Impressive // dollars? (Score:5, Informative)
The UK's weather bureau give specs on the Cyber 205 they were using in '82:
http://www.met-office.gov.uk/research/nwp/numer
CDC Cyber 205
200Mhz Clock
1 MegaWord of memory
The Cyber had a 64 bit word size so that amounted to 8 MB of ram. So clockspeed has increased over 600 times and memory has increased over 4000 times in that time frame. This is just confining myself to the 205. I didn't look for the specs on other large machines like the Crays that were availiable then.
Computers as something just anyone could play with were pretty much nonexistant prior to 77 (true you could build something ENIAC-like anytime in the seventies if you were REALLY good with electronics). It's more instructive to see what the kind of money they had to spend on the CSIRAC will get you as time moves forward. Power comparable to the C64 was availiabe in the early sixties for that kind of money.
CSIRAC played the world's first computer music (Score:5, Informative)
Not bad for a living dinosaur. Listen to it [abc.net.au] yourself :)
lies, all lies... (Score:5, Informative)
These computers are not to be laughed at (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:These computers are not to be laughed at (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure they would not have snubbed their nose at the idea of being given a machine that had a GUI interface and piles of RAM and storage. Oh, to be able to focus on the problem at hand and not have to be distracted by the limitations of a 64 byte stack!
To belittle the programmers of today because they have not suffered the restrictions of yesteryear is a bit silly. Even today, there are embedded systems programmers who still deal with such restrictions. Do we elevate them to deity status? No, we just sit back and wait for Carmack to speak.
Re:These computers are not to be laughed at (Score:5, Insightful)
What does he do now? He is still an application writer, his language of choice being Python and his file format of choice being XML. Frankly, I think this is quite telling: his opinion if I understand it correctly is that since we have the power, we shouldn't waste time writing things lower level than necessary. By using Python and XML he's far, far removed from the ordinary perils of yesteryear like memory management, pure procedural programming, even memory and disk size limitations.
And frankly, while those things are difficult to deal with, they're also very rote and don't leave much expression to the software engineer. People who favor C and to some extent C++ usually admit that there is some pleasure in the sheer amount of control in using the language; it's my opinion that people using Perl, Python and to some extent Java are the people reading books with "Practical" or "Design" in the title, and that's really a better way to do things.
In reply I would merely point you to the bloatware that exists today on all systems. You call that the work of efficient (read good) coders? I don't.
It's an easy attack to make, with some degree of merit. The qualifications for being a coder these days are certainly less strict than they were at one time. However, the observation of the post you were replying to was that the older systems had less to do than modern ones. When you resize your browser window you're doing an operation that, as far as a 386 would be concerned, is non-trivial. Add to that the sheer size of the parsed webpage which generates the pretty view you see, and you've got yourself a lot of graphical things to do, and a huge datastructure in RAM. This is not the kind of problem that can be solved simply by being able to manually manage memory from assembler. This is the kind of problem that requires an intelligent design from the get-go, so that optimizations can be placed in the places where they are required as needed.
Bloatware? Probably. People who needed computers for whatever reason seemed to be getting along with them just fine without GUIs, or multiprocessing, or realtime 3D games. All of these additions is going to consume resources both when written and when used. I won't argue with you that Windows would have been better if it were based on a clean design. Clearly it would have, and on Linux we now have many desktop systems based on (if not a good deal more forethought) at least the trial-and-error process that produced the early GUIs done with a faster turnaround. Unfortunately, the users have come to rely on GUIs, pretty widgets, and browsers that resize. If they were not, perhaps we could cut down on the code quite a bit.
Also, one thing about my friend I mentioned earlier: while his code is extremely well-designed, he seems to have a fundamental lack of understanding of ideas such as UI design and concurrency. None of his programs as far as I have seen have used threading, even the GUI ones, and the few GUI programs I have seen were beyond the ugliness I expect from TK. He wrote an abstraction layer for a database that implemented foreign key constraints, and was at a bit of a loss when I first tried to explain to him that it wouldn't carry over necessarily if multiple copies of his application were running simultaneously. So we all have these problems, and we all try to get better.
If you want to see well designed and implemented code, I recommend you pick up a copy of BeOS. By sacrificing backwards compatibility, they managed to create an operating system from scratch based on object-oriented principals. It's quite amazing when you realize the things that you could do with it that you couldn't do with Windows, yet it was a tiny fraction of the size of Windows when fully installed. For example:
Now I'm going to get some sleep and try to forget about the sorry state of computing we're in right now.
--
Daniel
Re:These computers are not to be laughed at (Score:5, Funny)
Re:These computers are not to be laughed at (Score:5, Funny)
I remember the good ol' days before lawn mowers were invented. We would stoop over the lawn for weeks with tweezers in hand. Each grass blade was skillfully cut by a true craftman. Now your "best" lawn mowers simply buzz through a yard, never even seeing individual grass blades.
I have used this machine! (Score:3, Interesting)
god I feel old...
Years ago, when I worked at the CSIRO I worked on this machine for a while. I'm amazed it didn't die long ago. It used RPN for calculations, which takes getting used to, but is far better then algerbraic.
It's processor (not CPU - it consisted of multiple chips) is a hardware FORTH type. The jokes about FORTH programmers are true!
Lpt:1 would really be on fire! (Score:3, Funny)
Reminds me of some of the old linux kernel code, and thinking its good to have a sense of humor.
Trying to get a printer working and getting a kernel message saying Lpt:1 on fire!
It's dead and gone ( unfortunately ) (Score:4, Informative)
" Sadly, it's not an option to make CSIRAC operational again today. Time has taken a toll on this fragile dinosaur.
So what exactly would happen if anyone tried to relive the magic by switching it on?
"A lot of its components would not stand having voltages applied to them again," says Thorne. "I think it would probably catch fire."
Not as slow as it sounds (Score:5, Funny)
Unclear (Score:5, Insightful)
" A half-century old computer, called CSIRAC, is still operating in Australia. The computer, which was Australia's first, ran at a blistering 300 kilohertz, had 2 KB RAM, and 2.5 KB storage."
But the Inquirer article [theinquirer.net] linked by the above Geek.com article says:
"The machine was the fourth computer to be built anywhere in the world, ran at 0.001MHz, and had a massive 2000 bytes of memory and a behemothic 2500 bytes of storage."
Which, by my calcuations, would be 1000 hertz or 1 kilohertz. I tend to believe the Inquirer, since they're running the source article. And besides, the 1977 Apple ][ was only 1 MHz, Don't you think there was a bit more progress than less than doubling in processor speed from 1949 to 1977?
Re:500 hz initially, 1 khz later (Score:5, Informative)
I sold a few programs for the beast on 2KB EPROMS. There can be quite much stuff in 2K. (for example an editor + assembler + disassembler). Once I added almost 500 bytes in a 2K program, and optimized it back into a 2K chip. Talk of ugly coding, used all the tricks I knew (reusing jump addresses for instructions, self-modifying code (written backwards in the rom to save a byte in copying it into ram), jumping into unrelated routines to reuse 4 bytes of the exit code, you name it. All done in pure hex... Man, those were the days...
The computer is dismantled and stored... (Score:4, Informative)
Following the University of Melbourne's purchase in 1964 of a Control Data 3200 from the USA, CSIRAC was donated to the Museum of Victoria. At this time it was realised that CSIRAC was the oldest computer still in operation, and worthy of preservation so it was carefully dismantled and stored.
CSIRAC is now the centre-piece of the IT display at the Museum in Melbourne.
CSIRAC will never run again... (Score:5, Informative)
As I understand it, the music was recorded by building a replica of the sound hardware and connecting it to the emulator. People who heard the music have confirmed it sounds pretty much like the original in 1955 (IIRC, it was around that time).
Perhaps the coolest thing that they did with CSIRAC was build a HLL and compiler for it, which they called Autocoder IIRC. It looked like a cross between FORTRAN and BASIC and avoided some of the thinkos of FORTRAN, as far as I could tell.
CSIRAC is now permanently on display at the museum in Melbourne, Australia. It's the only complete, original machine of its generation in existence, and well worth a look if you come down our way. There is also a book on CSIRAC called "The Last of the first", which is a fascinating read if you can get your hands on a copy.
One of my university lecturers, Peter Thorne, got his start in computers as an operator for the machine. He met his wife there - she was a fellow computer operator!
Knock Knock! (Score:3, Funny)
*60 second pause....*
CSIRAC!
Pioneers (Score:3, Funny)
Great old guy. His wife does a great pumpkin scone.
50 years at 300KHz (Score:3, Informative)
50 years * 366 days/year (rounding up) * 24 hours/day * 60 minutes/hour * 60 seconds/minute * 300000 cycles/second = 4.74336e14 cycles
Now, my Athlon XP 1600:
4.47336e14 cycles / 1400000000 Hz / 60 sec / 60 min = Roughly 89 hours
So even if this machine were still running (which, incidentally, it's not. RTFA), in terms of pure cycles of functionality pulled out of the machine, my Athlon beat it in the first four days. It's a lot easier to maintain a pair of shoes than it is an airplane. And of course, this machine ISN'T still running, and would likely execute an HCF instruction (Halt and Catch Fire) if powered on, so you really can't call it reliable.
(Of course, my Athlon's running Windows (needed a games machine), so it's debatable whether or not these cycles have actually been functional...)
--AC
Re:50 years at 300KHz (Score:4, Funny)
So might your Athlon [tomshardware.com], son... So might your Athlon.
how do you replace vacuum tubes? (Score:4, Interesting)
The trick... (Score:3, Insightful)
Some examples: DEC (Digital Equipment), in their heyday, came up with some great techniques for memory management at the hardware level. I'd be curious to know how many of those ideas got rolled over into more current stuff.
Another one; Where would we all be if Xerox's PARC facility had never come up with what has morphed into today's electronic rodent? Heck, IBM was using light pens years before that.
In short; You don't want to just ignore something because it's "old" or "obsolete" (Essence, I loathe that word!). You need to take the good ideas from the old stuff and build on them.
Somehow, I doubt that we would have so many tons of electronic junk choking landfills today if computer and electronics hardware was (a), really built to last, like the old stuff was; And (b), built to be easily upgradeable.
CISRAC photo (Score:3, Informative)
Had that thing been running... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This is news?!?!? (Score:3, Insightful)
The article is clearly dated "Dec 10 2002" so it's not "from around a year ago" at all - no idea where you got that from.
Nick...