11–20 of 111 posts
> The aesthetics of the machine have not been neglected. The CPU is attractively housed in a cylindrical cabinet. The chassis are arranged two per each of the twelve wedge-shaped columns. At the base are the twelve power supplies. The power supply cabinets, which extend outward from the base are vinyl padded to provide seating for computer personnel.
The CRAY-1 was so ridiculously ahead of its time that it took until the Pentium MMX (1997) for “ordinary” computers to catch up to its raw performance. That’s 20 years or about 10,000X the available VLSI transistors via Moore’s Law.
I wonder how many times faster my iPhone 17 Pro Max is? Sometimes I like to remind myself we are living in the future. A future that seemed like SciFi when I was a kid in the 70s! Sadly I don’t think we will ever see Warp Drives, Time Travel or World Peace. But we might get Jet Packs!
to deploy a 2nd hand Cray-1 at UQ, we had to raise the ex-IBM 3033 floor, it turned out the bend radius for flourinert was NOT the same as a water cooled machine. We also installed a voltage re-generator which is basically a huge spinning mass, you convert Australian volts to DC, spin the machine, and take off re-generated high frequency volts for the cray, as well as 110v on the right hz for boring stuff alongside.…
Aerospace originally did that to reduce component size, CDC and IBM took advantage of the standard in the early 60's.
Strangely, it seems mainframes didn't adopt switching power supplies until the end of the 70's, despite the tech being around since the end of the 60's.
to deploy a 2nd hand Cray-1 at UQ, we had to raise the ex-IBM 3033 floor, it turned out the bend radius for flourinert was NOT the same as a water cooled machine. We also installed a voltage re-generator which is basically a huge spinning mass, you convert Australian volts to DC, spin the machine, and take off re-generated high frequency volts for the cray, as well as 110v on the right hz for boring stuff alongside.…
Another rationale may have been that the flywheel on the motor-generator would cover a multitude of power-quality sins.
to deploy a 2nd hand Cray-1 at UQ, we had to raise the ex-IBM 3033 floor, it turned out the bend radius for flourinert was NOT the same as a water cooled machine. We also installed a voltage re-generator which is basically a huge spinning mass, you convert Australian volts to DC, spin the machine, and take off re-generated high frequency volts for the cray, as well as 110v on the right hz for boring stuff alongside.…
The CRAY-1 was so ridiculously ahead of its time that it took until the Pentium MMX (1997) for “ordinary” computers to catch up to its raw performance. That’s 20 years or about 10,000X the available VLSI transistors via Moore’s Law.
I wonder how many times faster my iPhone 17 Pro Max is? Sometimes I like to remind myself we are living in the future. A future that seemed like SciFi when I was a kid in the 70s! Sadly I don’t think we will ever see Warp Drives, Time Travel or World Peace. But we might get Jet Packs!
"The 160 MFLOPS Cray-1 was succeeded in 1982 by the 800 MFLOPS Cray X-MP, the first Cray multi-processing computer. In 1985, the very advanced Cray-2, capable of 1.9 GFLOPS peak performance
...
By comparison, the processor in a typical 2013 smart device, such as a Google Nexus 10 or HTC One, performs at roughly 1 GFLOPS,[6] while the A13 processor in a 2019 iPhone 11 performs at 154.9 GFLOPS,[7] a mark supercomputers succeeding the Cray-1 would not reach until 1994."
Blew my mind age 4. Then found out about the imos transputer. And robotics magazine. 70's were popping. Ponging?
The CRAY-1 was so ridiculously ahead of its time that it took until the Pentium MMX (1997) for “ordinary” computers to catch up to its raw performance. That’s 20 years or about 10,000X the available VLSI transistors via Moore’s Law.
I wonder how many times faster my iPhone 17 Pro Max is? Sometimes I like to remind myself we are living in the future. A future that seemed like SciFi when I was a kid in the 70s! Sadly I don’t think we will ever see Warp Drives, Time Travel or World Peace. But we might get Jet Packs!
Thoughts:
1. To block some sunlight from getting in.
2. It’s a secure facility and wanted to prevent people from looking in.
3. To not have to look at something outside.
4. It’s a secure facility and wanted to prevent the chance of taking a picture of someone or something outside that could compromise the location of the computer or someone’s identity; sometimes the first place a photogenic computer was built was at a customer site.
The CRAY-1 was so ridiculously ahead of its time that it took until the Pentium MMX (1997) for “ordinary” computers to catch up to its raw performance. That’s 20 years or about 10,000X the available VLSI transistors via Moore’s Law.
I wonder how many times faster my iPhone 17 Pro Max is? Sometimes I like to remind myself we are living in the future. A future that seemed like SciFi when I was a kid in the 70s! Sadly I don’t think we will ever see Warp Drives, Time Travel or World Peace. But we might get Jet Packs!
Sadly most of that power is not working for you, most of the time, but working against you, by spying, tracking and manipulating you.
Bet that was not include in your sci-fi dreams in 70s..