You can—and should—lose hours digging through IBM’s “Antique Attic”, an online catalog of the actual old machines they hold on hand for posterity’s sake. This Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator is circa 1948; it looks straight out of an Asimov paperback backdrop.
IBM’s “Antique Attic” gallery
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-that or a set piece from “Colossus: The Forbin Project”.
Cool site, bu the pictures look like they were created with the use of an antique digital camera.
My first reaction to this was “Man, somebody just made an awesome LED-lit couch.”
WANT!
Oh, wait, it’s only a 4-banger…
DO NOT WANT!
Some of the pictures were probably scanned from promotional material, which means stuff that was already halftoned for printing.
I sorta miss lights-and-switches consoles. There was something comforting in watching Das Blinkenlights and knowing that, at the very least, your machine had not gone into an error trap loop… And I sorta miss the days when big iron surrounded you rather than fitting into your pocket; it somehow felt so much more impressive, independent of actual computing speed. “It’s not REAL science unless it makes you feel like a roach in a radio.”
That looks like it would make the perfect computer desk. I could put that in my room with my Intel iMac on top and wait for people’s brains to explode when they see it.
CHRS:
That’s exactly what I thought too. That might make a pretty nifty MAKER project, actually.
Of course, that’s just the SSEC status console. The computer itself filled a room.
http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/ssec3.jpg
…They just don’t make computers like that anymore, dammit.
I always scoffed at certain “computers” in science fiction movies and television series, with their panels of blinking lights that couldn’t possibly convey any useful information. Mother, the Nostromo’s computer in Alien, is a prime example, along with the blinking panels on the bridge of the original starship Enterprise. I knew about Das Blinkenlights, and I’m a fan of flashing indicators of all sorts, but the idea of huge panels filled with row upon row of identically-hued lights seemed a bit much.
Fat lot I know, apparently. It’s wonderful that there were engineers who could read the patterns in panels full of monochromatic bulbs, flahing away as the tubes went about their machiney business.
Hey! They didn’t show one of the tabulators they made for the Nazis! WTF?
The Nazi tabulators are the same as the US Social Security tabulators, so…
ever see Yojimbo? (aka “playing both sides against the middle”)
That console is seriously breathtaking. Really stunning.
@technogeek: We must be of the same tribe… we used to have this sign taped to our mainframe, courtesy of the IBM Customer Engineer:
Das Machine ist nicht für Gefinger Pokken und Mitten graben
Ist easy snappen der Springenwerk, blowen Fusen, und corkpoppen mit spitzen sparken!
Ist nicht für gewerken by die Dummkopfen.
Das rubbernecken Sightseeren keepen Hands in die Pockets.
Relaxen und watch die Blinken Lights.
Strider, Colossus: The Forbin Project actually seems to have used a number of consoles from the much-later IBM 1620 for their movie, with a very characteristic blue/black pattern.
The architecture of the IBM 1620 was weird, stated mildly. It had the nickname “CADET” – which someone expanded to “Can’t Add, Doesn’t Even Try”, since the machine did all of its arithmetic by table lookup.
Apparently, replacing the table values was a popular student prank.
There’s a 1620 drifting in and out of working order at the Computer History Museum in California.
Das Machine ist nicht für Gefinger Pokken und Mitten graben…
Posted on the doors or windows of most of the computer rooms at Argonne Labs in the mid-’70s… Come to think of it, remember how computer rooms always had plate glass windows looking in, so the laity could see the acolytes about their business servicing the altars?
Das Machine ist nicht für Gefinger Pokken und Mitten graben…
This was also posted on the windows of most of the computer rooms at Argonne Labs in the mid-’70s…
Come to think of it, remember how computer rooms always had plate glass windows looking in, so the laity could see the acolytes about their business servicing the altars? Ah, bygone days.
Crap, sorry for the double post. It didn’t seem to appear the first time.
Many years ago, I took a set of those multi-patterned fancy Xmas lights, back when they were new and expensive, cut a piece of pegboard to fit a big empty spot in the comm racks, and spent hours poking the lights through the holes in the pegboard and tying them down from the back. I put the whole thing behind a piece of smoked glass in the wee hours of the morning on New Years’ Eve.
My boss thought it was the most awesome thing she’d ever seen, and from then on she’d make a point of standing in front of it whenever she was doing a dog’n'pony show for important visitors. We had people with PhDs in Computer Science in that room who never asked what the incredibly complex display was; I had it labeled “rozhdayetsya photonic emission monitor” as I recall. Eventually it burned out and I took it down.
#10: Yes, there really were people who debugged using this kind of display, before octal/hex displays (and long before software debuggers). Typically they displayed, bit by bit, the status of the most important registers/busses in the machine, as well as letting you peek/poke memory and I/O locations.
When running, they flickered nicely; a good programmer learned to recognize the patterns created by particular loops in a program and could get a general sense of what the machine was doing from that. Standard technique for “error traps” was to go into a tight go-to-self loop so the lights stopped flickering; the address of that, plus any values the error routine had loaded into the registers or stored in particular memory locations, was the equivalent of an error message. (Predating the later use, with hex displays, of values such as 0xDEADBEEF)
For debugging purposes, you’d use console switches to single-step through the program, reading the instruction being executed and the status of the registers, or poking new values into the registers and memory to try out a patch. Folks got pretty good at recognizing the pattern of bits for various instructions, and at mentally converting binary to decimal and back.
I never worked on a console this complicated, but I did play with a few machines which had simpler versions — an older midsize Honeywell, and later some DEC machines (-11s and -10′s). Typically I only had to use the lights and switches to enter a short bootstrap loader which would bring in the next loader from cards or punchtape, which would then bring in the main program I wanted to run… but there were a few programs where the “sense switches” were part of the startup/configuration input, and there were a few times when I was debugging device driver level code though the front panel.
Not that I want to go back to those days — but it really is a good learning experience. Everyone should “build a mnemonic circuit using stone knives and bearskins” at least once.