We've just seen this programme, which we enjoyed very much indeed. It's about the Voyager spacecraft. It's really quite emotionally moving, if you're of that kind. I am.
www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b09gvnty/storyville-the-farthest-voyagers-interstellar-journey
Anyway, here's the question. One of the scientists was talking about computing power, and to paraphrase, he said:
"You have to remember that the most powerful computers in the world in 1972 were only as powerful as something you have in your pocket today. And I don't mean your smart phone. I mean your car key fob".
What do we think, computing expert panel? True, sort of true, complete hyperbole?
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For dramatic effect, of course. And depends exactly what you mean by "computing power", but his message or the comparison he wanted to give, is valid..
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>> "You have to remember that the most powerful computers in the world in 1972 were
>> only as powerful as something you have in your pocket today. And I don't mean
>> your smart phone. I mean your car key fob".
>>
>> What do we think, computing expert panel? True, sort of true, complete hyperbole?
No that statement is wrong. However your key fob power in 1972 would be about the size of a large lorry trailer.
I once had the privilege of talking to one of the IBM engineers on the mercury space mission. The skill then was to make things with very little computing power and storage do a lot. They were very economically disciplined, careful and clever with writing the software.
Today software developers are cowboy and profligate. And getting worse.
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I remember being told that my new Spectrum had as much power as the huge computer which was dedicated to running the miners [payroll (all 300,000+ of them). I didn't doubt it then and I don't't doubt it now. the speccy had a keyboard and video output too, which is more than the NCB payroll machine did!!
I remember my early days in computers and as Zero says there was no scope for sloppy programming, all the programming had to fit in small spaces and along very specific boundaries.
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The great thing about Voyager is that they are still running, still sending us data, on of course, the original hardware.
And the other great thing is that they launched 40 odd years ago, and in all that time - Thatcher, miners, millennium bug and a billion other things - they have been traveling away from us as fast as humanly possible, and now they are where they are on the edge of interstellar space, and if one of them sends its daily signal now, 7pm, it will be here by tomorrow lunchtime.
That lightspeed thing is darned FAST.
Last edited by: Crankcase on Wed 12 Dec 18 at 19:24
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>>and if one of them sends its daily signal now, 7pm, it will be here by tomorrow lunchtime.
>>That lightspeed thing is darned FAST.
Wow!
We are now able to measure man made objects distances in relation to light periods, - it is about 3/4 of a light day away!
The radio signal is 18 watts apparently. Even more amazing that we can pick it up.
I wonder what the baud rate is?
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The observable universe is around 93 billion light years across. Makes you feel kind of insignificant.
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....and makes me laugh at those who claim there are no other forms of life anywhere in the universe. Such arrogance!!
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>>...and makes me laugh at those who claim there are no other forms of life anywhere in the universe. Such arrogance!!
I've heard that accusation before. Why is it arrogance?
It may or may not be wrong, but arrogant?
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>>It may or may not be wrong, but arrogant?>>
Well if you can't work out why........:-)
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I can't, that's why I asked.
I've heard it before and wondered why, so I thought I'd ask. Don't worry if you can't answer, it was only idle curiosity so not important.
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The arrogance, if you can't work it out, is through declaring without having any evidence whatsoever, that there is unlikely to be life anywhere else in the Universe.
The Universe, as you will be aware, stretches to infinity we are informed through 360 degrees, so how could they possibly know?
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>> The Universe, as you will be aware, stretches to infinity we are informed through 360
>> degrees, so how could they possibly know?
1/ No-one states there is unlikely to be life of any form anywhere else in the universe
Can you state who said this?
Plus
2/ we dont know that the universe is infinite
3/ we dont know if this is the only universe
Last edited by: Zero on Thu 13 Dec 18 at 07:53
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Actually were anyone were to make such an assumption they would have evidence on their side.
The Universe is around 14 billion years old.
The Earth is around 4.5 billion years old
Life evolved on earth around 3.5 billion years ago
As far as we know life evolved here only once. All life on earth is descended from that one event.
To date we have found no evidence of life beyon our planet.
So the the only actual thing we KNOW about life is that it once evolved once on Earth.
It may or may not be unique. We just do not know. All belief in alien life is supposition. It may or may not be true.
That is why the finding of life elsewhere, perhaps Mars, would be such a major scientific event.
Last edited by: CGNorwich on Thu 13 Dec 18 at 08:50
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I see that some of the older ones have responded already but I'll add my 2 cents.
As Mark says, it was for dramatic effect. Technically though, the pundit was incorrect.
The first system I worked on was a Foxboro Fox 2/30 Process Control computer which dated from 1972. It was capable of controlling, in realtime, a diamond processing plant with hundreds of analogue and binary inputs and outputs. It wouldn't have fitted in Voyager though.
s3data.computerhistory.org/brochures/foxboro.fox2-30.1972.102646170.pdf
Basic specs start on page 18 of the above, but in the pic on page 17 the drawer pulled out on rails at the bottom of the central processing cabinet is the "bulk storage" unit. It had an impressive 512KB of storage and was incredibly expensive. It also needed a bottle of helium to keep the canister pressurised against dust ingress.
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What a fantastic bit of kit!
>> It also needed a bottle of helium to keep the canister pressurised against dust
>> ingress.
Was that to keep it squeaky clean?
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It was certainly squeaky bum time when ours started leaking and we were having to replace the helium bottle every week or two. A replacement unit had to be air freighted in from the US (to South West Africa) before it failed completely and shut down the whole plant costing millions in lost production.
Foxboro offered a big discount if the faulty unit could be refurbished but security regulations decreed that anything inside the restricted area could never be removed again.
A long but amusing account of Rolls Royce's response to "What comes on the mine stays on the mine".
www.oranjemundonline.com/Forum/index.php?topic=6254.msg93719#msg93719
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I've had time to read that now, Kevin. Excellent. I do like an obscure bit of amusing engineering history. I shall be retelling that one.
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That was interesting.
A bit of digging indicates the company may have been Vickers. This may have been the bulldozer in question.
tractors.wikia.com/wiki/Vickers?file=Vickers_Vigor_Bulldozer.JPG
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I once read that in the early 80's Air traffic control was run on nothing more powerful than an Amiga 500! - true or not I don,t know but sounds feesable!
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>> I once read that in the early 80's Air traffic control was run on nothing
>> more powerful than an Amiga 500! - true or not I don,t know but sounds
>> feesable!
It was run on ancient (60s technology) IBM hardware and software, at West Drayton (RAF Uxbridge). It had the deepest raised floor of any computer room I ever saw, needing a ladder to get down.
But it did need to be resilient and reliable. And it was, I think it went something like 30 years with no unplanned hardware failure. Of course now, like the banks, so much flakey modern crap has been nailed up and down stream of it it not the reliable system it was
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In the late 70's some of the people were thinking back to the 60s/early 70s
One of the topics was the 1st customer in Scotland upgraded their system from 16K of core memory to 64K - at the time many questioned why they would ever need as much as 64K.
The customer was Goldbergs - a Glasgow Department store - it went bust in the late 80s / early 90s - so it just shows you the High Street had stores disappearing even then - the difference was that there were always new stores opening in their place - unlike today.
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In an interesting coincidence for this thread, this news story about the death of Evelyn Berezin has popped up today:
www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-46539934
Last edited by: Crankcase on Thu 13 Dec 18 at 12:32
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Saw that, quite strongly dispute quite a lot of that article (as I was working in the WP arena in the 70s). Evelyn Berlin had little or no impact in her day in that field.
Last edited by: Zero on Thu 13 Dec 18 at 12:58
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I started with Wang in the 80s and they were claiming then to have had the first proper word processor.
I#'m in no doubt they were wrong but they had a pretty good product.
And of course old Dr Wang was ex IBM so it can't have been all bad... till his son took over anyways!!
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>>Wang in the 80s and they were claiming then to have had the first proper word processor.
>>
>> I#'m in no doubt they were wrong but they had a pretty good product.
Where I worked we had early Wang word processors and they were well thought of.
However they did not have WYSIWYG which everyone takes for granted so unless you had good imagination re the text and the control characters, print out the document to see how it looks :-(
I still have some of their EIGHT inch floppy " Diskettes" in their cardboard protectors with the big slot, almost the size of my whole little finger, to access the recording surface.
When youngsters talk about floppy disks ( in their little hard plastic cases ) I can fan a Wang one and say " This is a proper floppy disk ! "
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Haha SSSD or SSDD or DSDD were the flavours IIRC. (Single sided/single density, single sided/double density... guess the last one! LOL). Then came the 5.25" disks.... then the 3.5"s.
I was in a tech dept, supporting Wang machines, and we were large enough to qualify for a dedicated on-site Wang engineer.
The bigger machines (minicomputers ) used an 8" floppy disk to boot, and he was paranoid about how and where we kept this disk (which ISTR wasn't readily duplicatable). He nearly had a seizure one day when he came into our office and saw it attached to our wall board using a magnet. We were, of course, teasing him and it was just a replica...
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I have SSSD " Hard Sectored" type.
I had better be careful cos they have the silver stick on write allowed
sticker covering the notch at the bottom right :-(
A search for wang 177-0063 leads to various stuff and some images of said diskettes and the Wang terminal etc.
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I worked at Air Traffic Control circa '73-74 in Catering as I have mentioned before. You put in Brackets (RAF Uxbridge). Was WD Air traffic under their jurisdiction then? If so that's new to me. I was allowed in to the control room on more than one occasion and was fascinated by it all.
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>> I worked at Air Traffic Control circa '73-74 in Catering as I have mentioned before.
>> You put in Brackets (RAF Uxbridge). Was WD Air traffic under their jurisdiction then? If
>> so that's new to me. I was allowed in to the control room on more
>> than one occasion and was fascinated by it all.
It was still officially an RAF base until 2010
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I also remember that the security was almost nil. Clearly it wasn't required. Our new 'friends' are to blame then, or did I dream it?
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I think I was last there about 4 years before it closed, no worse or better than any other similar sized station.
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>> I also remember that the security was almost nil.
Security as we know it now just wasn't a feature until after 9/11.
In early eighties I was working in Chancery Lane and utilising the staff canteen at the Royal Courts of Justice. Walked in off the street past the Lord Chief Justice's court and another where Lord Dening routinely sat. Through the West Green Building and up to the 13th floor of the Thomas More Building where staff caff was situate. Any member of the public could have done same.
Once in a blue moon there was a check at the canteen entrance but only to stop those not entitled scoffing our subsidised grub.
The IRA could not have been ignorant of fact so one assumes they chose not to go for assassination of the judiciary.
Last edited by: Bromptonaut on Sat 15 Dec 18 at 22:14
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>> I also remember that the security was almost nil.
I recall visiting a Whitehall site that had very secure access to parts I wasn't invited. I understand there's quite a complex of tunnels under there, use the toilets in the 'spoons The Lord Moon of the Mall to get an idea.
Young lasses thought it would be a good idea to get a tan on the roof at lunchtime and couldn't understand the red spots on them, until someone pointed out it was laser sights of snipers on adjacent roofs and told the roof was out of bounds.
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>> I worked at Air Traffic Control circa '73-74 in Catering as I have mentioned before.
>> You put in Brackets (RAF Uxbridge). Was WD Air traffic under their jurisdiction then? If
>> so that's new to me. I was allowed in to the control room on more
>> than one occasion and was fascinated by it all.
I think they had some sort of parenting/lodger unit status, a bit odd as WD was a station in its own right. But then it's not unknown for such set ups across two or even three stations.
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>A bit of digging...
Get yer coat!
Seriously though, I bet you're right.
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Question for the old computer techs - No FM2R
