One day, a computer will fit on a desk

You took your predictable time, you only just waked up :D :D :D
 
Tommy Flowers who worked for the Post Office at Dollis Hill produced the world's first programmable computer which speeded up Turing's Bombe many thousands of times. It used 20,000 valves. It took him quite a long time to pursuade the Powers That Be to fund it. They said at the rate of one valve lasting - say 100 hours, the machine would never work because someone would be constantly changing popped valves. But Tommy knew, and pursuaded them that the way to make a valve last forever was to gradually increase the heater voltage from zero to 6.3 volts over a two week period, and never turn it off. It worked, and speeded up decryption of Enigma signals many many times. The 5 unit code punched paper tape was driven past a photoelectric cell at 30mph, meaning that each character was read and tested in a tiny faction of a second compared with Turing's Bombe which took about one whole second to read one character.
The first Collossus was fired up and got working just two or three days before June 6th 1944. Naturally when the invasion got under way, the number of German Enigma signals exploded, so the need to decrypt them was of utmost importance. We had to know if Operation Fortitude was working, and if the Germans had swallowed our dummy armies at Dover so they didn't rush their troops to Normandy.

At the end of the war Churchill insisted that all the Collossuses / Collossi to be destroyed, and indeed they were. This was to prevent our enemies which by this time included the Soviets from knowing that we could read their messages pretty quickly. He instructed that we must not tell the Americans, and subsequently we were quite happy to let the Americans claim that they had made the first programmable computer.
Some very very clever, and very dedicated staff at Bletchley have rebuilt a Collossus, complete with the 20,000 valves, and the only documentation they had to go on was a few old photographs of the machine. You can go to The National Museum Of Computing at Bletchley Park and see it demonstrated. The NMOC is in the same fenced grounds as the Bletchley Park Museum, but the two are not one item, you have to pay to go to either of them, but the NMOC is much cheaper, and to my mind more interesting than the Museum - except for the fact that in the Museum part you can go into the original 'huts' with creaky floorboards, teleprinters, typerwriters and dim light bulbs. And there you can see our TypeX encryption machine, (not working) which the Germans never broke. I think the correction fluid Tippex is a very very clever name for the product. It does exactly what the TypeX machine did: delete the original character and enable you to replace it with another character.
 
Oh and by the way I started working for Nationwide Building Society in the computer comms room in 1975 when they first connected all their 300 branches to a central computer. Did you know you can run 300 branches of a building society using 30mb of hard drives?
 
I seen big massif hard drives in a skip out back of a big biz computor co at Hydpark just up the road from me, size of dinner plates, must have been worth a bob or two in scrap.
 
gasgas said:
Oh and by the way I started working for Nationwide Building Society in the computer comms room in 1975 when they first connected all their 300 branches to a central computer. Did you know you can run 300 branches of a building society using 30mb of hard drives?
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No you can’t, you could back then but not now 😂😂😂
 
I can well remember feeding 5 1/4 discs to load DOS and Windows on our Elonex desktop, I think HDD was only 10mb, then a week later you'd be doing it again.

Anyone remember Xtree gold?
 
Nah, I used to sit on one in the car in the 80's though, fecking awful thing, soon got binned.
 
My dad gave me an abacus for a joke Shristmas present once, I learned how to use it, and it is actually quicker than using a calculator when you get to know it properly. Probably why the Chinese use them to calculate the profits they are making on selling calculators to the West.
 
The 18" diameter hard drives in the Univac 1110 we used at Nationwide would periodically crash. The gap between the read /write head was smaller than a human hair so if any tiny particle got in there, the head would crash, destroying the disc. They came stacked in 'cake-stand' tiers. Each disc cost the same as a 3 bed semi house. But the decorations up the three storey staircase in the HQ building cost the same as a 4 bed executive house. Come Christmas 1976, Univac wanted three engingineers to go to Moscow to look after a machine they had there, to do any repairs necessary if it went wrong. They were offered full board and lodge of course, plus all the hours they were on Russian soil at three times their normal hourly rate. With one accord they said Nyet. Further temptations were put their way and as Christmas drew nearer their demands grew greater. Eventually the agreement was they could take their families, put up in the top five star hotel in Moscow, have all taxi fares, food, drink, theatre tickets and so on expenses paid, and they would be paid some huge amount of money into a Swiss bank account. One of them used the money to have an architect design and build a really executive house for him and his family in the poshest part of Swindon.
There was a funny fire alarm related incident at Nationwide, but that would be drifting off topic and we don't want to do that do we?

Later in life I worked in the computer dept at Alliance and Leicester building society in Leicester. They built a large complex building for their HQ, and it included a huge computer room, much bigger than the computers and comms equipment that were going in it. The theory was that as the company expanded they would need bigger computers and more comms equipment. In reality what happened was that computers got smaller, as did the comms equipment so the room, when I left, was big enough to play football in, as well as house all the technical stuff.
 
gasgas said:
There was a funny fire alarm related incident at Nationwide, but that would be drifting off topic and we don't want to do that do we?
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Are you mad, it's what we do go for it.
 
gasgas said:
My dad gave me an abacus for a joke Shristmas present once, I learned how to use it, and it is actually quicker than using a calculator when you get to know it properly. Probably why the Chinese use them to calculate the profits they are making on selling calculators to the West.
Click to expand...
Quite a few times when I was checking out of Hotels in the Far East the employee would pull up my account on the computer and double check the figures with an abacus before printing out my bill. :ROFLMAO:
 
We were taken on a tour of the hydropower works near us in portugal ...the computer room was gigantic made to house the computer when the place was opened. Had 60 workers then...now three employed and all run by a little laptop in the corner of the room!
 
At Nationwide naturally we had fire practices. Correctly done, they were at random times and dates. The fire alarm would sound and the Tannoy would say in a cool, calm collected tone "The Fire Alarm has sounded. Do not collect any belongings and move to your allocated assembly points for a roll call". Everyone would finish what they were doing, get their coats and sandwiches and saunter out to the assembly points.

Then came the time of the Irish 'troubles' and the computer centre was built around a quadrangle which was the staff car park. A bomb going off there would annihilate Nationwide's entire computer and communications facilities. The quadrangle had a 15ft wide entrance. So when the Irish 'troubles' started the premises officer decided to have a controlled barrier erected at the car park entrance. He learned that a 10ft barrier was a lot cheaper than a 15ft barrier so he had the 10ft barrier plus two concrete bollards , one each side of the barrier. These filled up the 15ft gap.
Then one day there was a real fire. Obviously the fire alarm system was connected to the fire station over the road, and connected to the barrier so it would lift when the alarm sounded.
Then one day, Tannoy: "THERE'S A FIRE. GET OUT. REPEAT, THERE'S A FIRE, GET OUT" in an absolutely panicked voice. Everyone dropped their abacusses and ran down the stairs to the assembly points, wondering where the fire was.

The fire engine came screaming round the corner. It came screeching to a halt in front of the lifted barrier. Ten ft barrier, twelve ft fire engine. You cannot fit a 12ft fire engine through a 10ft barrier.
Anyway the fire was just in a rubbish bin and they put it out with portable extinguishers.
The concrete bollards were removed and the 15ft barrier was installed. At three times the original cost of a 15ft barrier, naturally.
 
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