John W Colby
jwcolby at gmail.com
Sun Mar 30 18:15:39 CDT 2014
From 1975-1978 I maintained the computer system that ran an aircraft carrier intelligence center. The computer was a 30 bit machine, with 32 K words of core memory. Sperry Univac 642B: http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/X184.83 It had an 8 mhz clock so ran (at most) 256 K instructions per second. And it was the size of a huge refrigerator. Designed in 1958, it contained no ICs (there were no ICs back then) but it did use transistors. We were trained to trouble shoot down to the gate level using schematics and an o'scope. IIRC, the disks were 8 platter packs, each platter the diameter of a large dinner plate, with around 20 mbytes. Two of those in huge drawers, the entire thing was the size of two huge refrigerators. The system drew maps for the pilot briefings using pen plotters. The CRT system was the most fascinating of all. It used a disk with fixed heads as the memory, and read the data off of the disk and sent it directly to the CRT. Write to the disk to change what was displayed on the screen. Character based only as I remember. John W. Colby Reality is what refuses to go away when you do not believe in it On 3/30/2014 5:51 PM, Doug Murphy wrote: > It is amazing the amount of computing power you can rent for a small amount of money. > > You were a few IBM generations after the first computer I learned on, IBM 1620, at my college. It took up a whole room, and had a heard of real geeks for it's care and feeding. They got really POed whey a card deck would put it into a loop;-) Now I think you can get about the same amount of computing power in a cheap watch. > > -----Original Message----- > From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Brad Marks > Sent: Sunday, March 30, 2014 12:25 PM > To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving > Subject: Re: [AccessD] To the Cloud or Not to the Cloud. that is the Question > > Doug, > > Thanks for the tip on Amazon AWS. I have read a little about this offering but have not yet played with it. > > I have had quite a bit of fun with Microsoft Azure SQL. I have studied the restrictions of Azure SQL. I don't believe that these will be a problem for the little project that I am thinking about. > > Sure feels like some major IT shifts with the realm of tablets and the world of cloud options. > > We have certainly come a long way from the IBM 360 Model 40 that I cut my teeth on. > > Brad > > > --- This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active. http://www.avast.com