Hacker News Reader

Comment by saqadri | Hacker News Reader

20,000 sq ft of space for a computer that processed only 1200 cards/min. The tone of the narrator made that sound very impressive, which it was back in 1973.

50 years from now I wonder what things we are amazed by today will sound silly to future technologists.

View on HN

Funnily enough, you'd be hard-pressed to read cards much faster than that today. The limit was on the mechanical side, moving the cards fast enough without jamming or tearing them. The processor would have been 99% idle if reading 1200 cards/min was all it was doing. On big systems, since cards were such a bottleneck, they would often be read in with a small computer or dedicated card-to-magnetic-tape machine.

</random Hollerith trivia>

In ~1990, I was working on Xerox high volume printers that cost $100K-$1M each (AT&T bought fleets of them to print phone bills). They printed at 50-135 pages per minute on ordinary paper (not card stock). Many types of engineers worked on those printers, but I was always fascinated by the aerodynamics engineers working on the paper path, sometimes meters long, through the printer. Early prototypes of those machines would constantly have horrific paper jams because the aerodynamics weren't tuned well enough yet. Some of these jams did significant damage to internal parts.

Security operations centres for private companies that have lots of screens in them and tiered rows of desks. Bonus points if they have a podium at the front for briefings. Additional bonus points for having glass window view plane for visitors. Final bonus points for a button that converts the graphs on screens to a world map or some other BS when actual guests do arrive. It’s like some type of Apollo 13 fever dream.

You just narrated an entire scene from War Games.

1200 cards/min is the rate for reading cards (which in this case represent executable code) into storage for later execution. It's possible for data entry there's a different pathway for loading just stacks of data onto tape or disk for those programs to act on.

The year is 2073. Intel announces the launch of the Core i11. Benchmarks show an incredible 7% increase.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com