Distrowatch

[Tony Arnold]

On Wed, 2005-04-06 at 17:04 +1200, Lindsay wrote:
> What I'd like to know is, are any of these old computers kept alive in
> museums or are there just no valves etc.. alive to work them anymore?  I
> lost my memory back in 1968 and dont recall the monsters of before that
> time.

You may be aware that the first stored program computer was built at the
University of Manchester (UK) back in 1949. It was known as Mark 1, used
valves and cathode ray tubes to store the programs.

A replica of this was built in 1999 to celebrate 50 years of computing
at Manchester. The replica  actually works and is now in the the Museum
of Science and Industry here in Manchester. Take a look at
www.computer50.org for more information.

Regards,
Tony.

> On Mon, 2005-04-04 at 15:48 +0100, Tony Arnold wrote:
> > On Mon, 2005-04-04 at 23:54 +1000, Peter Garrett wrote:
> > > On Mon, 2005-04-04 at 06:41 +0100, david wrote:
> > > > On Mon, 2005-04-04 at 13:04 +1000, Peter Garrett wrote:
> > > > > On Sun, 2005-04-03 at 22:19 -0400, mario8723 wrote:
> > > > > > Emphasis on 99%. How did I know somebody was going to respond like that?
> > > > > > =D>
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > -- 
> > > > > > mario8723
> > > > > > 
> > > > > 
> > > > > <cue: Monty_Python_4_Yorkshiremen>
> > > > > 
> > > > > Aye, well....
> > > > > 
> > > > > When *I* were lad, used to punch out Fortran IV, on mechanical punch
> > > > > keyboard.... carry deck 'o cards to front counter of Computer Centre,
> > > > > *queue* for privilege of using IBM mainframe, and come back *a day
> > > > > later* to find printout of bugs!
> > > > > 
> > > > > XP? OS/2? Win3.1 ? HA! *YOU* were *lucky* !!
> > > > > 
> > > > > </ Monty_Python>
> > > > > 
> > > > > 
> > > > 
> > > > 
> > > > luxury!
> > > > 
> > > > We had a bag of ones and zeros which we had to lay out on t'ground and
> > > > if we got it wrong father would whip us wi' cat5 cables.
> > > 
> > > 
> > > Ones and zeros? You were lucky! Our Mum and Dad would throw letters from
> > > alphabet soup on t'floor and make us write COBOL with 'em before we
> > > could eat 'em!
> > > 
> > > Had to lick ground clean wit' tongue to debug program !...
> > 
> > 
> > Right ...
> > 
> > 
> > Back in 1975, every morning and evening, I used to have to key in 30
> > words of octal number using a row of 16 switches on a PDP-11/20 just to
> > load a bootstrap program. The system used to boot up from a 256 kilobyte
> > fixed disk, run 16 terminals (Olivetti teletype) and used 2 exchangeable
> > hard disks each holding 2.4 megabytes. The system had 16 kilobytes of
> > memory in total.
> > 
> > (This is absolutely true, but you trying telling it to the kids of
> > today, and they won't believe you!).
> > 
> > Regards,
> > Tony.
> > -- 
> > Tony Arnold, IT Security Coordinator, University of Manchester,
> > Manchester Computing, Kilburn Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL.
> > T: +44 (0)161 275 6093, F: +44 (0)870 136 1004, M: +44 (0)773 330 0039
> > E: tony.arnold at manchester.ac.uk, H: http://www.man.ac.uk/Tony.Arnold
> > 
> > 
> > 
> 
> 
-- 
Tony Arnold, IT Security Coordinator, University of Manchester,
Manchester Computing, Kilburn Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL.
T: +44 (0)161 275 6093, F: +44 (0)870 136 1004, M: +44 (0)773 330 0039
E: tony.arnold at manchester.ac.uk, H: http://www.man.ac.uk/Tony.Arnold