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It is not just computer history that they do not know. While they know who the "first tier" characters of American history, such as Washington, Lincoln, and such, they draw a blank when it comes to the second tier. Just ask them who John Jay was, or try Martin van Buren or James Garfield or ... Well, you get the idea.
Our nation was build by a strange bunch with radical ideas. Just read the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence[^]. This is stuff we should have learned in elementary school and high school. 
Enough with the soap box, already....
__________________
Lord, grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, but just don’t have the damn bandwidth to handle right now.
© 2009, Rex Hammock
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Jalapeno Bob wrote: is the fact that the modern smart phone has several times more computing power and more storage than you see in that entire room!
I could not find any direct comparables but I am rather certain that several benchmarks are going to be quite a bit more than "several".
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I'm just an anonymous poster, but I notice that several of you are intrigued by the fact of "my smartphone has many times more power than this room sized machine". While not incorrect, it is woefully inadequate as a comparison.
As best as I can tell, the machine depicted in these photos is the circa 1959 RCA 501 Data Processing System:
http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/RCA/RCA.501.1958.102646273.pdf[^]
http://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/afips/1958/5052/00/50520066.pdf[^]
Since word sizes and other concepts weren't entirely "standardized" to our current ideas and words relating to speeds, memory, and disk capacities - it isn't easy to compare that system to today's machines exactly, but one can get close enough.
For instance - the basic specs (at least, according to the above brochures and such) of the 501 indicate that, had you purchased the biggest machine they sold (and there's a good chance that these machines were lease-only) - it would have been a machine with a whopping 260K-characters of RAM (characters may have been anything from 7 bits on up in width; probably to a maximum of 36 bits or so). Even if we say each character was a 32 bit word, that only equates to about 1 Megabyte of memory.
Near-line random access (think "disk" drive) storage, and of course tape storage and punch-card storage, could all be expanded much further - but due to the size of the "drives" and the need to storage of those larger formats, buildings would have been needed to keep anything greater than a few hundred megabytes of data close at hand (and some customers probably did set things up this way).
Speed? Difficult to say. But we can probably safely put it as somewhere around 1 MHz - maybe 2 if we're being generous. This isn't really an accurate or fair way to rate such a system, though - it really isn't a comparable thing. But you can bet that compared to today's systems, it was dog slow.
That doesn't even take into account the size of the air conditioning systems needed to cool the thing (multiple 12-ton a/c units, if I read correctly).
Oh - did I say today's systems? While true - it isn't a good picture. What would be something more modern that would be comparable to it? Something that could be purchased in the past by an ordinary person, which could have had the same processing and storage capability?
Just about any microcomputer from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s would likely qualify: Apple IIe, C=64, Atari, TRS-80, etc; any of these, with a floppy drive and a box of floppies, would have likely been faster and had more storage, than the RCA 501, 20 years prior.
Now - do you think your phone has more power than those personal machines? Of course you do. What, perhaps, was considered a "top of the line" system of those days?
Well:
Cray-2 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[^]
That machine was one of the fastest - if not the fastest - supercomputers on the planet back in 1985. Read about it - then notice one of the closing lines of the article:
"In 2012, Piotr Luszczek (a former doctoral student of Jack Dongarra), presented results showing that an iPad 2 matched the historical performance of the Cray-2 on an embedded LINPACK benchmark."
Here we are - 4 years later. We're up to the iPad 4. Smartphones haven't gotten slower; they've gotten faster, have gained more "cores" and speed, more memory, better GPUs, etc. They are connected 24/7 to the rest of the internet (and to each other).
So what can you say from all of this?
Well, number one, you theoretically carry around in your pocket enough processing power to simulate and design nuclear weapons with. You could predict (with varying levels of accuracy) the weather. You could model various real-life physical systems. In short, you (many of us!) have in your pocket enough processing power that would have made data scientists, researchers, various government agencies - from 1985 - green jealous with envy. In fact, it is no stretch of the imagination to think, that if you could somehow take something like a smartphone back to 1985 - you would be one of the most hunted persons on the planet.
Today, it would be comparable to if somebody showed you a phone that had the power of a clustered system of D-Wave quantum computers; do you really think there isn't a government that would kill to have that kind of portable computing power? Think again.
As someone whose first computers was one of those machines from the early 1980s (a TRS-80 Color Computer, specifically - with 16K!) - I am and always will be amazed and floored, yet grounded in reality - of what we carry in our pockets. Our desktops and laptops are even greater in power (heck, the video card in many systems has an insane amount of processing power compared to earlier supercomputers).
But what amazes me most about all of this? Despite the fact that we each carry around with us so much computing power (stick a hundred of us in a conference room, and we'd likely have more computing power in that room than the world did in 1985) - we still don't do much with it, as individuals. Instead, we use these machines in the most mundane of ways: email, web browsing, gaming, music. For the most part, they are nothing more than entertainment boxes, and the majority of people have no concept of how they work or anything. To them, it is magic.
Indeed, in my own profession (I am a software engineer) - you could ask more than a few of my fellow colleagues, and they themselves would be hard-pressed to tell you how a computer really works. Even for them, it's become a "magic box". Sure - they code on it - but they couldn't tell you how the system turns that code into the output. Do they need to know this? Not really - but it would honestly make them better programmers if they did. Unfortunately, it isn't something that is taught any more except in graduate computer science courses (and even there it seems like something of a rarity - which worries me).
So - keep all of this in mind when you next look at your smartphone. Your smartphone is more than just "faster than that RCA machine" - a better analogy would be to say your smartphone is as far removed from the RCA 501, as the 501 was to ancient stone counting tables (aka - the abacus).
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I worked in a data center similar to the one in the photo. The person sitting at the console had the "easier" job. Continually mounting and dismounting magnetic tapes on the tape drives was a bit more work.
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Is oxygen the element of surprise?
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That almost made me lanthanum hafnium.
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In ethyl nitrate, amen.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a f***ing golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?"
"You mean like from space?"
"No, from Canada."
If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns.
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Ag! Stop! I can take No Mo'!
I am not a number. I am a ... no, wait!
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when they die? How about your mom or dad? Do let me know when they die, so that I can make fun of them. It will help you heal, trust me.
Edit: I removed the profanity. However, I don't think it is cool to make fun of dead people, especially brave people, who died trying to further science and space travel.
modified 28-Jan-16 13:21pm.
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Have you been bitten by something venomous lately ?
«Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.» Benjamin Franklin
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Take a gander at the space shuttle thread.
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You were related to one of the astronauts? 
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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You know what NASA stands for now - "Need Another Seven Astronauts"
What was the last thing NASA heard on the radio before the Challenger blew up? "NO BITCH - NOT THAT BUTTON!"
That's all I have...
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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I see people every day making fun of Obama, and his presidency is a much bigger tragedy.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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OK, was somebody from your family involved in the space shuttle crash explosion ?
If not, I don't understand your problem.
If yes, I don't understand it neither.
modified 28-Jan-16 13:28pm.
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Rage wrote: I don't understand agree with your problem.
Surely you understand it, although you may not agree with it. 
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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...and there goes the pedantry award of the day  
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I agree. 
For some reason that particular one is a pet peeve of mine. Sorry.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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Well, I have an excuse, I translated it directly from french - "comprendre" = "understand" in first intention.
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Your jimmies seem rustled.
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...but 30 years later...?
I don't know. Hogan's Heroes was a sitcom set in a WWII POW camp "only" 20 years after it ended.
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Weren't they making fun of the Nazis/Germans, and not the prisoners so much. I could be wrong.
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