Re: Newbie question on table design.

-CELKO- wrote:
...
> Yes, but it discovered large data sets from the start since it was a
> scientific machine. Ever see a data cell machine?
> ...

capacity something like 400 MB in 1969, considered gigantic at the time, half-second access time, cost about CAD 250,000. ten years later, i was given one, it had about 1200 hours on the clock. i think it weighed about 800 pounds. in those days, most mainframe hardware had permanent castors with excellent bearings. model might have been called a 2319, can't remember for sure. other people called it the spaghetti picker. full of parts like big 3-phase motor with labels saying things like "lubricate every twenty years", real NASA quality, I thought at the time. i was hoping we could trash a bunch of market research tapes by using it instead but decided we couldn't afford maintenance contract on it and then to take it apart as I wanted the rotary compressor in it. warning labels too, about compressed nitrogen. finally got through to a retired CE who laughed when i told him what i was up to. he asked where it was and when i said the computer room told me to get it out of there, said if you disconnected in wrong order, the twenty-gallons of hydraulic oil would shoot everywhere. so i took it apart in the parking lot.

btw, when you had a PARS-based financial network of hundreds of dedicated teletype terminals, replacing them with VT's was lot cheaper than buying the only IBM alternative at the time, 3270's, not to mention their expensive terminals, i seem to remember about half a million bucks cheaper, plus cheaper maintenance.

i know this stuff is quite off-topic here but there's a lesson in it, at least for me. about fifteen years ago a bright young programmer asked me what a mainframe disk drive looked like. even then, i told him, they were individually about the same capacity as the spaghetti picker but were housed in a six-foot high box, that was so the customer engineer could get his head inside. (i read somewhere that one IBM CE was decapitated due to a faulty manual.) this reminded me of all the wasted years mucking around with the physical limits of those days. I envied him and still envy the young kids who could potentially spend their time on the more important logical questions.

p

p Received on Fri May 04 2007 - 00:05:06 CEST