<font color="blue"> Anyone else have memories of dedicated rooms (for equiv of power of today's desktop), rows of reel to reels for data storage, massive cooling systems, punch card decks and dot-matrix ribbon printouts? </font>
Oh yeah.... /forums/images/graemlins/cool.gif
In the old days (he-he, sounding like my grand-dad), I used to work for Control Data. Control Data's primary market was Engineering and Scientific customers. The hardware and supporting equipment to cool and power the computers was large and very expensve. In fact, in Control Data's R&D and manufacturing facility in Arden Hills, MN, they found out that they could heat the building with the computer equipment and flourescent lighting during winter. Lots of BTU's expended with those old mainframes. The computers had piping that ran inside them to cool the machines. Air cooled - hah!!
I had the opportunity to work in a few of the larger computing labs throughout the country. Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, Lab for Laser Energenics in Rochester, NY, and at the Computational Facility at Los Alamos. By far, the Los Alamos computing center was the most awesome. When I was there in the mid-80's, there were tons of large Control Data, Cray, IBM, and DEC equipment. Under the floors were tons of cables and large pipes supplying chiller water to the computers.
One day, a major chiller problem occured and all of the chillers shut down and no chilled water was being provided all of the computers. Every available on-site field engineer in the computing facility were called to action. Now keep in mind that you cannot just hit the master switch and turn off mainframe computers. All of the disks - I mean a major disk farm here. Hundreds of large disk drives must be shut down properly or you could damage the disk surfaces with the heads. If you ever saw what happened when a head hit a spinning large disk, you would remember. And each drive had multiple platters.
When the alarms rang, it looked as though the place was under attack! Field engineers jumping over desks and beginning the shut down procedure. They had to get things shut down in the proper order to bring down the mainframe so that it didn't burn up from the loss of chiller water. Now, we are talking lots of machines too.... in multiple rooms.... not including those in locked areas with highly classified purposes.... needless to say, a real mess.
In general, the maintenance of these large beasts was costly. They needed to be shut down and tested weekly. The maintenace was usually for an hour or two on each machine. And once a year, each facility was shut down to tighten all of the electrical connections and grounding straps. What a nightmare!!!!
Now, you just plug in these little devils and occasionally dust them off. If something breaks, run down to Walmart and get a new part. In fact, it's easier to maintain your home PC than your car or truck. Use to be the reverse. /forums/images/graemlins/confused.gif
Terry
