Stunningly beautiful photos of old timey computers

The first actual computer I worked with, rather than send cards off to, was an HP in the NPL. It had 32 registers of 16 bits each. This was all ferrite memory. Everything else was written to the drum memory. That was about 1975. You had to enter the boot loader with switches (about 16 bytes) before it could read the rest off paper tape. Good ole days? You can keep 'em.

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Ha, ha, paper tape.

You donā€™t know hell until you put 2000 lines of fortran on punch cards and then drop the stack walking to the computer room.

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I have one of those modules on my mantle. Itā€™s from an IBM 704 computer. Mid fifties scientific computer, very big, very slow, you were lucky if it worked correctly at all.

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Thanks, that makes sense. Although the person who saved mine thought the modules were too interesting to all be discardedā€“he saved out about 20ā€“he didnā€™t seem to mind the end of the machine. Maybe with your information I can coax a little more of the provenance of mine from him.

The only card comparison with paper tape was sort of card reader that TORE UP the cards while reading them, especially LARGE NUMBERS of them VERY FAST. Or fired them across the computer room. That was fun, too.

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I did a bit of research the hard way to find that same answer, not realizing you had already answered the question. :slight_smile: Fortunately I enjoyed the research.

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I used to have a module from an old Remington-Rand UNIVAC computer, which I acquired on ebay. I displayed it on my website.
http://www.nixiebunny.com/rand409-2/
Itā€™s actually from a machine thatā€™s a few years newer than I thought, but it is the only module of its type known to exist in the world, so a collector bought it from me for way too much money.

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A handy safety feature was to draw a diagonal line on the side of the deck.

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Proustian memorysplode

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