Just for the sake of asking... (was - RE: Trivia Question)

From: Tillman, Edward <Edward.Tillman_at_valero.com>
Date: Thu Feb 27 03:39:00 2003

Just for the sake of asking:

What is a "real computer?"

What are its power requirements?
What are Its space requirements?
What is its storage capacity? How?
How many calculations per second?
What I/O processes?
What I/O media?

Y'see... I once met a "real computer" -- I think, and used the darned
thing for over two years.

It was in a big concrete building, way up north (almost to Santa Claus). It
occupied the entire basement of a large, windowless, cubical concrete
building, and generated enough heat to warm the whole place during some
pretty harsh winters. Its power requirements on a day-to-day basis kinda
rivalled Spokane...

Its base mainframe measured 60' x 120', had 30 dumb-terminal workstations in
its ops center, serviced 120 remote terminals in the building, networked 35
outlying remote stations, but could boast only 1MB of memory, and could
handle maybe 3000 calculations per second while in pre-emptive time-sharing.


It was idiosyncratic: Though end users tended to interact with it via
attached light pens and keyboards, it also had some of the very first
"touch" screens -- it only gave up the time-slice when it wanted to...

You talked to it through both mag tapes and punch cards. If you fed it a
nice, neat stack of punch cards, it literally vomited "hash" back at you.
If you attempted the same program with 18" 'high-speed' reel-to-reel mag
tapes, it fed you back spaghetti. There was often electrical arcing between
user screens and light pens, and I hate to think of the number of monitor
screens replaced on the 'touch screens' when some user thought calibration,
or 'a little harder' meant putting a knuckle or two through the screen...
And we won't even go into the horrid monsters at the end of each corridor
know as "batch printers..."

It that a "real computer?"

> -----Original Message-----
> From: cctalk-admin_at_classiccmp.org_at_PEUSA On Behalf Of
> vance_at_neurotica.com
> Sent: Friday, February 21, 2003 5:42 PM
> To: Philip Pemberton
> Cc: cctalk_at_classiccmp.org
> Subject: Re: Trivia Question
>
> On Fri, 21 Feb 2003, Philip Pemberton wrote:
>
> > Eric Smith wrote:
> > > That's quite a sad definition of "real computer". Any one of my
> > > PDP-8 or PDP-11 systems, even the wimpiest, is much more of a "real
> > > computer" than any PC compatible will ever be.
> >
> > What, even if said PC is a K6-II/400 running Linux? I've got two PCs
> running
>
> A PC running Linux is not a real computer.
>
> Peace... Sridhar

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Received on Thu Feb 27 2003 - 03:39:00 GMT