This brings back memories -- my father went to work for the Rand Corporation (System Development Division -- later spun off as SDC) in 1956 to join project SAGE. He was later the site leader of one of the SAGE installations at Stewart AFB in Newburgh, NY. The SAGE computer -- the ANFSQ7 (or Q7) was quite a spectacle -- it weighed over 300 tons and used 3 megawatts of power to run. Magnetic core memory was developed for it, and it's arithmetic unit was in a large room -- run by tubes. There was an air force private (or corporal) on duty in the arithmetic unit all the time to replace the tubes as they blew out (each one had backups, and would switch to it automatically when it blew). It also had a specialized Polaroid camera (one of the first built) with a wide angle lens which would automatically snap a picture of the lights and switches on the console in case the machine crashed (which was very rare -- I think that all the Q7's were down less than 3 hours per year throughout all their history).
Victor On Aug 28, 4:35 pm, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 8:52 AM, Bill Hart<goodwillh...@googlemail.com> wrote: > > > On slashdot today is an article about vintage hardware. It sports a > > link to a photo of the Sage Air Defense System. I thought devs might > > be interested in seeing that: > > >http://www.pcauthority.com.au/Gallery/153867,computer-history-museum-... > > > The first photo up is actually the Sage. > > Here's my the current Sage hardware cluster: > > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1xBLvbbPvQ > > > > > Bill. > > -- > William Stein > Associate Professor of Mathematics > University of Washingtonhttp://wstein.org --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
