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 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