Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2013/12/13
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Interesting, Larry. We had a lot of Nixie displays in early wind tunnel control rooms. I ran across a catalog a while back that offered kits for building your own Nixie clocks. :-) Jim Nichols Tullahoma, TN USA On 12/13/2013 5:07 PM, lrzeitlin at aol.com wrote: > Interesting old computer story. In this day of smart phones it's hard > to believe that computers were once as big as houses. As a young > college student I used to walk by a building on campus that emitted > sounds like a threshing machine. One day I wandered in and found that > it was the home of the Aiken Mark 1 computer, a 30 foot long electro > mechanical device that was like a Frieden Calculating machine on > steroids. The noise was the sound of thousands of relays opening and > closing. It took 3 seconds to add a pair of numbers, about 16 seconds > to divide them. Dr. Aiken started work on it before WW2 and it > continued in operation well into the Korean war cranking out data for > the military. I was shown around the lab by An Wang, a graduate > student, who later invented the core memory and founded Wang > computing. In fact the first computer I ever bought for myself was a > Wang 700 that required programming in assembly language, displayed the > results on Nixie tubes and stored programs on audio cassette > cartridges. High tech indeed. > > Larry Z > > > > _______________________________________________ > Leica Users Group. > See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information > > >