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The largest computer ever built | 661 comments | Create New Account
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The largest computer ever built
Authored by: lnuss on Friday, March 29 2013 @ 09:27 AM EDT
Most people don't think of it that way, but the telephone network of the Bell
System after direct dialing came along (much/most of it electromechanical,
depending on the time frame that you consider) was one gigantic computer, made
up of central office switching machines all over the country (world, actually,
once international calling became common). One switching machine I worked on
took up a couple of floors of around an acre each, and there were thousands (not
all so large) around the U.S.



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Larry N.

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The largest computer ever built
Authored by: JamesK on Friday, March 29 2013 @ 11:03 AM EDT
All those vacuum tubes bring real meaning to the term "hot standby".

BTW, many years ago, I worked on a vacuum tube "computer", built by Teleregister, located in the Toronto Stock Exchange. My first task in the morning was to start it up. The first step was to use a variable transformer to gradually bring up the filament voltage. Then after a few minutes, I'd fire up a motor/generator set to produce the high voltage (+- 130V DC).

Teleregister Magnetronic Bid-Asked Stock Quotation System

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The largest computer ever built
Authored by: JamesK on Friday, March 29 2013 @ 11:24 AM EDT
Several years ago, I read a book "IBM's Early Computers" that
described some of the things that went into SAGE. One item I recall from that
book was how IBM gave up on working with ceramics manufacturers and developed
the material used in ferrite cores in house. It seems the ceramics
manufacturers couldn't produce it pure enough.


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The largest computer Who ever built?
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, March 29 2013 @ 04:30 PM EDT
Where did Life get the pic of the CRT? With the Chinese characters?
Google-image has one copy credited to extremetech.com 1 day ago.
But motherboard.vice.com has a large wall mounted display
of part of the same coastline ...

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Putting that into perspective......
Authored by: tiger99 on Sunday, March 31 2013 @ 05:17 AM EDT
.... a Raspberry Pi is about 1000 times more powerful (speed and memory), and uses about 600,000 times less power. Due to inflation, I can't easily make a cost comparison, but would guess maybe 10 to 100 million times cheaper? Can't be bothered to work out the size and weight improvements, as I can't find the weight of the Pi right now (anyway, dominated by the wall wart and case, if used), but guessing factors of millions again.

If only the same amount of development effort that went into computers had gone into other vital issues such as food, pollution and health.....

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

The largest computer ever built
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, April 01 2013 @ 05:21 PM EDT
Considering all those tubes, I wonder what the actual up-time
was?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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