Science, Technology & Medicine

Mainframe computers
Sperry UNIVAC 1108 (1964)
Mainframe computers

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There are 2 comments for this item.

Posted by kluv42 at 3:37 pm (PDT) on Mon September 26, 2022   
I used to operate an IBM 3081 in the late 80's...

Room full of gigantic tape readers, hard drives (like 25 of 'em, got us to NINETEEN GIG!!), huge air conditioners and a liquid-cooling box the same size as the CPU...  Both about the same size as maybe four refrigerators glued together... 

All of this got us about 1/50th the computing power of an iPhone (if that).  :)
Posted by Duff at 5:56 pm (PDT) on Sat May 9, 2009   
My first experience with computers was with the Sperry UNIVAC 1108 at NYU's UHMC computer (back when NYU had an engineering school at a campus in the Bronx). The machine had 131K 36-bit words of magnetic core memory; that's about 512K bytes. The user files were stored on a FASTRAND magnetic drum, which held 22 million 36-bit words (90 MB). Yet, this computer (running at 1 MHz, I believe) served the entire engineering school AND ran a real-time transaction system for the NYU Medical Center. When I compare this with the amount of computing power on my desktop or laptop, I'm amazed and ashamed. Of course, the 1108 wasn't running Microsoft Windows.

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