I started my first computing when I was a 1969 ME freshman running punchcards through an IBM 360 operating on FORTRAN IV with WATFOR. I still remember solving the Newton-Raphson method to find a good approximation for the root of a real-valued function f(x) = 0. It uses the idea that a continuous and differentiable function can be approximated by a straight line tangent to it. I was astonished by the successive iterations, that they could be programmed, and that an approximation could give such good results. It was a real eye-opener.
If I remember correctly, the Cray-1 took about 15 tons of air conditioning to keep it cool. Sandía Laboratorios had several of them back in the day.
I remember when we were in awe of the Cray and how it was used to process seismic data.
pretty amazing times. in ‘78, the economy was so bad, i had to go back to college to start a new program in math and computer science: best career decision i ever made. it was a very good ride for 30 plus years.
The Cray was operating on MUCH tighter code, though.
For those interested, you can hook up some playstations to get a home-brewwed super computer.
‘K, you are awesome !
It is a lot of change. One of my first jobs after the Navy was working with Maxtor and Seagate. Somewhere I still have a 5MB 5.25” full-size winchester drive. 5MB!
I worked at Cray Research starting the 3rd year they were in business. I was a group member of the software testing group, then project leader, then department head of software testing. It was a great place to work. There was a lot of money to be spent, and they took very good care of the employees. There were high expectations of performance, and there was a lot of freedom given to figure out how to do your job, no time for anyone to micromanage your work. I really enjoyed my time there.
ping
I first worked on CDC CYBER mainframes (64, 170, 730, 7400) and the CYBER 203 and 205 Super Computers (designed by Seymour Cray while he worked for Control Data Corporation) before he started Cray Computing. I wrote Fortran and Assembly language for about 10 years. My division was bought out by Siemens Power System Controls in around 1990. I then transitioned to Oracle, SQL and PL/SQL. The 205 I worked on took up a 60,000 sq ft building. It was a 128 bit vector processing unit.
As recently as 1989 I registered for college classes using IBM cards and a checkbook. Now they’re both obsolete.
CC
IPhone: imported from China
The bigger part of mainframes and supercomputers is their I/O capability.
I just read through the comments on this thread. They reminded me of a very old story:
Back in the late 70’s, AT&T would send a punch card with their bill which was to be returned with your check.
Some guy who also worked in IT would bring his card into the office and punch “/*” in the first two positions.
The “/*” in the first two character positions was the IBM JCL (Job Control Language) designation for EOJ (End Of Job).
The modified card would be placed in a batch with all the other return payments.
When the job read the “/*” it would terminate.
Love the picture of the guy leaning on the disk drive.
Back in the Pentagon, we had one peculiar problem happening in the WWMCCS (Honeywell) mainframe. Around 03-0400 or so every night, several of the disk drives would start reporting errors. These disk drives were all adjacent to each other.
As the appointed system manager, I was asked to figure out what was going wrong. Eventually it came down to me staying overnight to see if I could catch the issue.
I did! It seems as soon as the nightly backups were completed, one of the operators would go in the back to take a nap.
Yup, this guy climbed up on the disk drives to sleep because they were warm!
Analysis complete, I issued a warning to not sleep on the equipment, especially the equipment with moving parts.
I used to teach the operating system for the Cray machines when I worked for Cray back in the late 70s.
I too remember the college punch cards and fortran. I also remember the guy selling the computer with two floppies saying it’s more than enough memory. And my first color laptop with 100meg hard drive.