ITNews

Ah, such fond memories I have of working with the CDC 6600. The Register posting Remembering the CDC 6600 is a walk down nostalgic lane for me.

It was the world’s super computer from 1964 to 1969, when the CDC 7600 took the title. I have fond memories of working with it too.

Super computers of the day shipped with several people dedicated to keeping the beasts running. I became friends with an engineer who had these machines mapped in his head. Being an electronic engineering student, I wanted to know how the machines worked and the secrets of their speed. I was surprised learning that the secret wasn’t so much about the switching speed of the discrete transistor circuits, but how fast heat could be transfered from the circuits. This was one of the genius components of the creator of the machines, Seymour Cray.

…John

The Techworld.com posting Colossus rises again is reporting how the world’s first electronic computer took 14 years to rebuild. Colossus was used to cracked the German High Command’s messages during the dying years of World War II.

“The machine is now being used to crack messages transmitted by German radio hams using the same Lorenz SZ42 coding devices used by the German High Command in 1944, and it’s being pitted against modern computers, to see which cracks codes fastest. You might expect this to be a one-horse race but Sale told the BBC that this was by no means the case, since Colossus was built for one purpose only, which makes it much faster than a general purpose machine.
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Colossus represents the oldest computer design still working - and it never crashed. How many of today’s machines could boast that?”

Amazing!

…John