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The largest computer ever built

scottlocklin.wordpress.com

122 pointsmef30 comments

> What are the manageable pieces needed to make quantum computing or deriving all electrical power from the sun a reality? I don?t know, and I don?t know of anybody else who does: therefore, such things do not count as legitimate long term projects.

Boy, that wording rubs me the wrong way. This stuff is known as "research". Yes, that makes it highly uncertain. No, that does not make it an illegitimate project.

Yeah, they're legitimate "research" projects, not "engineering" projects. No usable device is expected to be produced and put into service at the end. People funding that research are buying knowledge, not useful systems.

If you're in Bay Area, it (well, some pieces of it) is on display in Computer History Museum - http://www.computerhistory.org/VirtualVisibleStorage/artifac...

Thanks for the link. This is mind-blowing:

The software was written by The Rand Corporation and the System Development Corporation (SDC) and employed about 20% of the world’s programmers at the peak of the project.

This web design is terrible. I expect better from the Computer History Museum.

I tried Chrome, Safari and Firefox on OS X and it looks terrible in all of them.

Really? I went there, was able to clearly see a well written article, not cluttered with anything distracting that gave me the information I needed, allowing me to focus 100% on the content.

He's referring to the Computer History Museum link in the parent, not the SAGE article.

Not sure why you were downvoted -- I agree. The text scrolls off the right side of my browser (maybe b/c I'm not full-screen)? It drives me nuts when sites assume a minimum width of your browser, but this example is especially severe.

"Core Memory" .. that brings back a memory. I worked on an unrelated system while in the USAF that had 512 bytes of core memory. We had a problem where the data was getting corrupted some of the time, particularly on a message indicator byte that disrupted flow control. After a day of oscilloscope work, it turned out that one core in the array had gone bad, and it just happened to be in the "wrong" place.

The system had been designed in the mid 1960's, and this particular core array had been running since 1970 or so, and this was 1985. So 14 or so years of continuous uptime. There's something to be said about building hardware at the macro size, not the micro size. ;)

3-112-0_Theory_Of_Programming_Apr59.pdf is quite interesting.

If long term projects can be made obsolete by their deployment time, then on what basis can long term project actually happen. What ever you do, it's a gamble.

This is why "release early, release often" was invented.

"Our grandfathers knew about fault tolerance"

Just our grandfathers, and not our grandparents as a whole?

Given the time period in question, I think it's quite likely that all the people working on this project were men.

Well, our grandmothers had to tolerate our grandfathers' faults. That's probably enough to ask.

Unless your grandmother was Rear Admiral "Amazing" Grace Hopper?

I did consider her, but during the period in question she was working at UNIVAC on compilers.

I was fighting the generalization, not the details.

"Grandfather" also means 'ancestor'.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/grandfather

Okay, miss.

Another case ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather_clause

Your own 'ancestor' link is a referal to the definition of father of parent. It's not gender neutral.

Women were involved with programming from a fairly early date (you can find videos by Judith Clapp on youtube describing her involvement). As far as I know, they didn't have anything to do with the fault tolerant systems, or designing the computer itself. Therefore: yes, "grandfathers" is the correct word to use. Both in the English language sense, and in the gender sense in this instance.

I'm sorry you think it is more productive to call out perceived slights to your gender, rather than doing something awesome. I guess it's a lot easier kvetching than, you know, actually doing something.

Imagine a beowulf cluster of these...

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