Microchips and nanotechnology were huge words more than 50 years ago, when some of the computers we present below filled laboratories with their immense capacity for the era. In modern times, where computers have become small next to a penny these Moby Dicks full of transistors stand as museum pieces, nostalgic and educational tributes to a state of the art that became our present.
So you can get to know the largest old computers, we have gathered ten of them in a gallery and we tell you in one line from what era they were and what they were used for.
In this brief introductory gallery of the largest old computers, we act as a museum and review in black and white the beauty of those that, weighing tons, were the most agile of their era. Performing all sorts of operations, family-sized calculators occupied entire rooms and awaited the revolution that would shrink them and put them in our homes.
Z4 (1944)
Created by Konrad Ruse, the German Z4 used about 4,000 watts of power and ran at approximately 40 Hz. It had 64 32-bit registers, equivalent to 512 bytes of memory. A generic addition took 0.4 seconds to solve.
Colossus
Mark 1 and Mark 2 were the names given to the two generations of computers used by British cryptographers to decipher encrypted German messages at the end of World War II. They processed 5,000 characters per second and their existence was hidden until the late 1970s.
ENIAC
Super famous in its time as the Giant Brain, the ENIAC was the first electronic-digital and multi-purpose computer. Its weight was 27 tons and it was used to calculate equations useful for building a hydrogen bomb.
Analog Computing Machine (1949)
It was a little-known model that was in the engine research building at the Lewis Flight Propulsion laboratory in Cleveland.
UNIVAC (1951)
The acronym of UNIVersal Automatic Computer, it was the first commercial computer manufactured in the USA and the baby of those who had created the ENIAC. 46 systems were sold at 1.5 million per unit (capable of running at 2.25 MHz and performing 1,905 instructions per second). Moving it was complicated, as they weighed 13 tons.
The WITCH
The WITCH was the acronym for Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computing and was beginning to shrink in size. It was very slow (a multiplication took between 5 and 10 seconds) but justified its existence by its ability to work for long periods.
Whirlwind
Whirlwind was one of the first from MIT, which incorporating 4,500 vacuum tubes and 14,800 diodes, occupied up to 975 square meters. The first version had 512 bytes of main memory and could perform 20,000 instructions per second.
IBM NORC (1954)
Called the IBM Naval Ordenance Research Calculator, this was the first supercomputer and the most powerful of its time. 15,000 operations per second and a version of 2,000 64-bit words in its main memory, gave rise to 16 KB.
IBM 702 (1955)
The IBM 702 had already been announced in 1953, but the first production model was not installed until 1955. It was commercial equipment that could be rented from IBM. The system could have a maximum of 11,000 7-bit characters in main memory, that is, approximately 10 kilobytes. It could do 3,950 additions or subtractions per second, but multiplication and division were significantly slower.
BENDIX G-15
450 kilograms of weight were not much compared to what we were used to seeing, and it showed that things were getting smaller. The cost also, since this one cost $60,000 to enjoy 7.6 KB of memory.
IBM 305 RAMAC
The first computer in the world to have a hard drive was very famous. Its storage was 5 MB and the disk was not one, but 50 disks of 61 centimeters in diameter each.
Pegasus (1956)
Designed and built to be cheap and reliable, it had 5,120 40-bit words in memory, equivalent to 25 kilobytes. In addition, 56 words (280 bytes) of fast memory. The Pegasus 2 from 1959 is still in operation at the Science Museum in London. It is the oldest working digital computer in the world.
AN/FSQ-7 (1958)
It was the natural successor to the Whirlwind, used by the US armed forces along with IBM, responsible for its development. The computer weighed 275 tons and was one of the most capable of the Cold War with its 75,000 instructions per second.
IBM 7090
The IBM 7090 cost $2.9 million and was designed for large-scale scientific and technological applications. A curiosity is that it appears in the movie Dr. Strangelove from 1961. Another is that the next version was the first computer that sang, becoming the inspiration for the HAL 9000 scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
This is where we end this brief visual review of the prehistory of computers, those that gave the initial kick for the path to bifurcate into two complementary directions. The first is that of home computers, increasingly smaller. The other corresponds to the supercomputers, those that require thousands of square meters to calculate the probabilities of everything. Computing speaks for itself, or in this case, poses for you to learn from it.
