We think of how fast technology advances today in computers sometimes without appreciating just how fast it was back then, too. I always admire the planning, engineering, and construction of a vast machine like that being accomplished so swiftly mostly by hand, and yet being made obsolete and replaced by another even more complex machine in a matter of a few years.
As someone who has been working with computers for 50 years (49 really), I really enjoy these various looks back in time at how we got here ... I started in 1975, this machine is from 1947 ... another 28 years earlier than when I jumped in. Amazing. I also like how much mechanical equipment was required, and the sounds it all makes.
you were a few years earlier than i ..in 1979 i started working for a company that built SCADA systems ..they were LSI and VLSI computers built around the INTEL 8080.. each computer had 2 card cages with S100 backplane each cage held 16 cards..booted up using mylar paper tape..output was usually to teletype since these were monitoring systems..each computer was $1 million+ The part of these type of videos that fascinate me the most is the console i would love to see a closeup if each switch is labeled etc.. 4 years later i was working for Tandy on their microcomputers how fast things changed..
@@MickeyMousePark It's really amazing how much money these systems cost, and how little power (in the big scheme of things) they had, and _certainly_ how little memory they had. If you told a young person of today we had systems with 32K memory running business applications with four VTDs, a paper tape reader, paper tape punch, mag tape unit, and two 50meg disc drives ... it's really hard to imagine. We also had a lot of programs on mylar tape ... for jobs we used plain old paper tape ... since they were generally run just once.
The sounds and smells are what we don't get from current computers. Even I used to be able to tell what my PC was doing by the clicking sounds of the hard drive. Retro computing people have even made a clicker to emulate the experience somewhat, but its not quite the same.
I truly hope that those that were involved with this and other computer developments got to see what they started. They should be proud. I wish I could thank them in person. They changed the world for the better.
pretty incredible machine. Amazing how just a few years later the transistor machines came along and made these old tube machines look like archaic dinosaurs. Things moved really fast back then. These days all we get are slight increments in performance
You are 100% correct. 10 years ago, in 2014, I bought my PC at a local store, and it has a 3.40 GHz CPU and 16.0 GB RAM, the very same one I am using right now to write this comment, but Today, in 2024, the specs of local stores' on-the-shelves PCs have increased relatively very little
In the mid 1970s, we had minicomputers (DG Nova II, Nova III, Eclipse) in a room and virtually _everyone_ (not me) was smoking! That's just how it was in those days.
My smartphone has computing capabilities several orders of magnitude greater than that behemoth while using a millionth of it's power. The things we take for granted...
This was probably the first opportunity for differential equations to automatically “live and breathe”, to evolve, with the output of a calculation recirculating to become the input conditions for the next calculation, circulating thousands of times.
Very glad to see this video! I have loved working with computers, directly and indirectly, since about 1979, when I was in my 20's in Atlanta. Later, around 1985-86, we took delivery of one of the first IBM AS/400 machines purchased in southeast; at a bank I worked for in Atlanta. We also had ONE IBM personal computer in our department; the kind where one floppy 5 1/4 diskette loaded the program and another diskette for data. At the time, I had no idea how small that computer was compared to machines like this one in your video!
Hi @gillisjack, thank you for the great feedback. Glad you liked the video. It is amazing sometimes how big the old computers were, and how they seem to have vanished in just a few years. So many parts, yet so few parts survive. ~ Victor, CHAP
Interestingly, the NBC Reporter at about minute 5:55 said "...Einsteins of the Future... all can come here...", but the Einstein of then was still alive, as this occurred 7 years before his death in 1955, so Albert Einstein could have called them or gone there and said "what about Einstein of the Present?" :)
Hi @newmankidman5763, that's a great observation and great concept as well! Yes, he was still alive in 1948. That's a thought provoking comment... and made me laugh a bit too. Thanks! ~ Victor
Hi @olddisneylandtickets, That's a great question. Still trying to find out the details, but since it was not going to be used further, IBM's Watson had it dismantled. It was very out-dated after only 2 years in operation. He was focused on the new 701 computer and the ones that followed, and wanted a product line he could sell. I think a museum has the master control panel and some of the components. Still researching this.... Thanks! - VK
most likely it was simply scrapped or bits (especially the tubes) reused for other projects. Just like with all the other massive IBM machines, they were kind of tossed out once they went to work on the next one.
@@thesteelrodent1796 I'd question the reuse of the tubes. They wore out quickly and were the most failure-prone part of the calculator. They were also fragile. If I were inclined to bet, I'd say that the tubes were almost certainly scrapped, even if a few other parts might have been saved. Most likely the building AC system, fire suppression, and maybe some bits of the power supply room were saved, and the rest went to the scrappers.
Random fun facts from Gemini: 1) Today's supercomputers can perform calculations in a fraction of a second which would've taken the SSEC billions of years. 2) A typical modern smartphone is 2 billion times faster than the first IBM PC. 😄
These days, it would be called a programmable calculator and would fit in your shirt pocket! They've been around for close to 50 years. The calculator I use now is called RealCalc, which runs on my Android phone. I noticed something curious in the list of vacuum tubes. They seem to have a variety of filament voltages. For example, both a 6SN7 and 12SN7 are listed. Those are identical tubes with the exception of the filament voltage. A 25L6 is identical to a 6L6, which would be used if they standardized on 6 volt tubes. However, there are also some 12V tubes that have a center tapped filament and can be wired to use either 6 or 12 volts. I don't know why they didn't go with a single voltage for the filaments. The only situation I'm aware of where different voltages would be used is the old 5 tube AC/DC radios, where the filament voltages totaled about 120V, so they could be powered right off the power line voltage, without requiring a transformer.
Hi @James_Knott, great comment and question. I wish I could find out more about the SSEC tubes and choices. It seems that IBM did not publish very much detail on this machine (trade secret perhaps?). Have been researching it for months now. Perhaps deep in IBM's paper vaults is some more detail. Aren't many folks left who worked on this machine directly. I am sure some answers will turn up some day. : )
Remember that the power for the filament in a 25L6 and a 6L6 is the same, so the current in a 25L6 filament is 25% of a 6L6. If you have thousands of the things, the wire savings for a higher voltage could be considerable. Quickly scanning over some of the text in the video, it appears that the 12SN7s were used in a memory unit, and presumably the 6SN7s elsewhere, perhaps the ALU. It is entirely possible that different people designed the different sections, and may have had personal preferences. Or there may have been other overriding reasons to pick one or the other. I'd again suspect filament current as the reason to choose the higher voltage tubes.
Yeah! As a vintage radio nut I'm disappointed in myself that I missed that! Yeah, you'd expect differing filament voltages in a classic "All American 5" circuit, Not a "super calculator"!
Another great video from CHAP. Thanks guys ! Luckily the transistor was invented. You couldn't really build a practical computer any larger than the SSEC.
Hi @AbAb-th5qe, that is a very good question. Since the SSEC was a one-of-a-kind machine, there was likely a very limited amount of documentation on its internal instructions. Any existing records are probably with IBM Archives, or perhaps with the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, or the Smithsonian in DC. I hope this helps a bit. ~ Victor
@@ComputerHistoryArchivesProject Oh well. More lost history I suppose. The talk of it being available for use by scientists all over the world obviously didn't amount to much.
Hi @danlowe8684, Good question. Richard Feynman (1918 -1988) was an American theoretical physicist did brilliant work in many areas. His work on a “connection machine” and other advanced ideas was quite remarkable, and worth researching. I do not think there is any relationship to the design of the SSEC, however. My guess is that he would have thought of the SSEC as a rather simple but fascinating machine for 1948. Feynman was also a pioneering researcher into quantum computing, so he was considerably more advanced in his thinking. ~ Victor, CHAP
i came in during 70s - these 'punched tape readers' would have been mechanical - why they were so slow. they had 'fingers' that would dip down through the holes and make electrical contact with the platen below the tape. We used this through the early 80s but then optical tape readers finally came into play - much faster and less error rates. believe it or not? we used this tape through the early 90s fanuc changed everything - took the breath out of stagnant USA manufactures and figured out how to put it on chips (EROM) and the modernization of the core (cheaply implemented, not born by huge waste without direction) IBM? supported by our bloated government - via our tax dollars - a giant frog that grew so big? it had no pool to swim in. sad - because we developed all of this - you and I, our parents, our grandparents.
@@ComputerHistoryArchivesProject Industrial computers - i've had the 'treat' to work on the first -tape-o-matics made by pratt & witney and the forerunner of Ge Mark Century 1 and 100 industrial computers. These were built to create the highly precision turbine bucket blade profiles (before, they were traced via hydraulic tracers like a pantogram. They were all transistor, built from massive arrays of nand gates. We had the lead (America) for 30y, but dropped the ball (allenbradly, westinghouse/bendix/GE et al basicly went into profit mode and didn't see fanuc's first control, the model 5m seen by a GM buffalo engine plant who went to a trade show and saw their booth. He'd just left his plant, an entire celularized machine line consisting of 30 machines feeding one football field sized pallet line in front of them (think engine blocks moving down this line, each stopping at a particular machine for a specific operation) was shutdown while technicians were loading one single machine's executive paper tape -sometimes 4 large 1000ft each 10 inch reels that had to load sequentially and in very specific steps. If one tape had even a single load error (optical reader caught a error) it all had to be redone. He left that show and within several years? all the machines had upgraded fanuc controls. That was when American industrial control market crashed and started becoming distributors of fanuc, yaskawa, toshiba, others. True story.
Hi @prestonburton8504, wow, it sounds like you had some fascinating experience. "Tape-o-Matic" was really back there, early 1960's? Fascinating story. GE Mark Century machines are something I wish we knew more about. They seem to have faded in history. Great story. Thank you for sharing! ~ Victor, CHAP
Only 75 Years later every Smartphone is a million times faster. The only Question i have, did we achieve this all by ourselves or did we had help by things "falling" from the sky.
No aliens involved. Just the progression of tech. We went from the first powered flight, (The length of said FLIGHT being LESS than the WINGSPAN of a 757!) to landing on the MOON in 66 years! (1903-1969) 66 years is NOT a long time! America's fist space satellite was launched 66 years ago! (1958) The programming language FORTRAN (STILL in use TODAY!) is one year OLDER than that!
We think of how fast technology advances today in computers sometimes without appreciating just how fast it was back then, too. I always admire the planning, engineering, and construction of a vast machine like that being accomplished so swiftly mostly by hand, and yet being made obsolete and replaced by another even more complex machine in a matter of a few years.
This great machine should be in a museum for the public to see and admire.
Big game changer also happened 1948. The invention of the transistor.
Yes, exactly!
As someone who has been working with computers for 50 years (49 really), I really enjoy these various looks back in time at how we got here ... I started in 1975, this machine is from 1947 ... another 28 years earlier than when I jumped in.
Amazing. I also like how much mechanical equipment was required, and the sounds it all makes.
you were a few years earlier than i ..in 1979 i started working for a company that built SCADA systems ..they were LSI and VLSI computers built around the INTEL 8080.. each computer had 2 card cages with S100 backplane each cage held 16 cards..booted up using mylar paper tape..output was usually to teletype since these were monitoring systems..each computer was $1 million+
The part of these type of videos that fascinate me the most is the console i would love to see a closeup if each switch is labeled etc..
4 years later i was working for Tandy on their microcomputers how fast things changed..
@@MickeyMousePark It's really amazing how much money these systems cost, and how little power (in the big scheme of things) they had, and _certainly_ how little memory they had. If you told a young person of today we had systems with 32K memory running business applications with four VTDs, a paper tape reader, paper tape punch, mag tape unit, and two 50meg disc drives ... it's really hard to imagine.
We also had a lot of programs on mylar tape ... for jobs we used plain old paper tape ... since they were generally run just once.
The sounds and smells are what we don't get from current computers. Even I used to be able to tell what my PC was doing by the clicking sounds of the hard drive. Retro computing people have even made a clicker to emulate the experience somewhat, but its not quite the same.
Spectacular. The best contemporary history channel ever.
Hi @failuretocommunicate, you are very kind, thank you for the great feedback! ~ CHAP
Idk why i like the looks of these old computers so much
Edit: the videos have narration now thanks :)
It's fun to look back at "how things were done." I know I enjoy it too.
Glad you like them! Thank you for the great feedback! ~Victor
The sound the machine makes,is like Robbie the the Robot , from The Red Planet.
I truly hope that those that were involved with this and other computer developments got to see what they started. They should be proud. I wish I could thank them in person. They changed the world for the better.
pretty incredible machine. Amazing how just a few years later the transistor machines came along and made these old tube machines look like archaic dinosaurs. Things moved really fast back then. These days all we get are slight increments in performance
You are 100% correct. 10 years ago, in 2014, I bought my PC at a local store, and it has a 3.40 GHz CPU and 16.0 GB RAM, the very same one I am using right now to write this comment, but Today, in 2024, the specs of local stores' on-the-shelves PCs have increased relatively very little
@@newmankidman5763 My 5700G is 6 times as fast as the 4790K it replaced.
And it's the cheapest CPU I've bought in 30 years.
John Backus worked on this machine until IBM assigned him to their new 704 then he invented the Fortran language making this beast obsolete.
Thanks for that GREAT info, @CM .
Terrific video footage. I am surprised that they would have allowed someone to smoke a pipe in the room.
In the mid 1970s, we had minicomputers (DG Nova II, Nova III, Eclipse) in a room and virtually _everyone_ (not me) was smoking! That's just how it was in those days.
My smartphone has computing capabilities several orders of magnitude greater than that behemoth while using a millionth of it's power.
The things we take for granted...
This was probably the first opportunity for differential equations to automatically “live and breathe”, to evolve, with the output of a calculation recirculating to become the input conditions for the next calculation, circulating thousands of times.
Ironically, AI probably watched this documentary or soon will 😂
What a monster. It must have taken ages to plan where to place everything in the room.
Truly amazing!
This electronic calculator is a small tool (3:52). When I buy one please assist me in fitting it in my pocket. :/
Wow, very fascinating. Great video
Very glad you enjoyed it. Thank you for the great feedback. ~ VK, CHAP
Very glad to see this video! I have loved working with computers, directly and indirectly, since about 1979, when I was in my 20's in Atlanta. Later, around 1985-86, we took delivery of one of the first IBM AS/400 machines purchased in southeast; at a bank I worked for in Atlanta. We also had ONE IBM personal computer in our department; the kind where one floppy 5 1/4 diskette loaded the program and another diskette for data. At the time, I had no idea how small that computer was compared to machines like this one in your video!
Hi @gillisjack, thank you for the great feedback. Glad you liked the video. It is amazing sometimes how big the old computers were, and how they seem to have vanished in just a few years. So many parts, yet so few parts survive. ~ Victor, CHAP
At 4:21 big IBM THINK sign that were on walls and everyone's desk at all IBM facilities.
I have an IBM punch card from the 1960s with "THINK" punched out on it! So Cool!
Excellent.
Thanks very much. This was fun, but a long... editing job. Thank god IBM saved some great film clips.
Interestingly, the NBC Reporter at about minute 5:55 said "...Einsteins of the Future... all can come here...", but the Einstein of then was still alive, as this occurred 7 years before his death in 1955, so Albert Einstein could have called them or gone there and said "what about Einstein of the Present?" :)
Hi @newmankidman5763, that's a great observation and great concept as well! Yes, he was still alive in 1948. That's a thought provoking comment... and made me laugh a bit too. Thanks! ~ Victor
Yep!
That was awesome. What an amazing and sleek (for 1948) machine. I wonder what became of it and its enormous amount of components?
Hi @olddisneylandtickets, That's a great question. Still trying to find out the details, but since it was not going to be used further, IBM's Watson had it dismantled. It was very out-dated after only 2 years in operation. He was focused on the new 701 computer and the ones that followed, and wanted a product line he could sell. I think a museum has the master control panel and some of the components. Still researching this.... Thanks! - VK
most likely it was simply scrapped or bits (especially the tubes) reused for other projects. Just like with all the other massive IBM machines, they were kind of tossed out once they went to work on the next one.
@@thesteelrodent1796 I'd question the reuse of the tubes. They wore out quickly and were the most failure-prone part of the calculator. They were also fragile. If I were inclined to bet, I'd say that the tubes were almost certainly scrapped, even if a few other parts might have been saved. Most likely the building AC system, fire suppression, and maybe some bits of the power supply room were saved, and the rest went to the scrappers.
Random fun facts from Gemini: 1) Today's supercomputers can perform calculations in a fraction of a second which would've taken the SSEC billions of years. 2) A typical modern smartphone is 2 billion times faster than the first IBM PC. 😄
These days, it would be called a programmable calculator and would fit in your shirt pocket! They've been around for close to 50 years.
The calculator I use now is called RealCalc, which runs on my Android phone.
I noticed something curious in the list of vacuum tubes. They seem to have a variety of filament voltages. For example, both a 6SN7 and 12SN7 are listed. Those are identical tubes with the exception of the filament voltage. A 25L6 is identical to a 6L6, which would be used if they standardized on 6 volt tubes. However, there are also some 12V tubes that have a center tapped filament and can be wired to use either 6 or 12 volts. I don't know why they didn't go with a single voltage for the filaments. The only situation I'm aware of where different voltages would be used is the old 5 tube AC/DC radios, where the filament voltages totaled about 120V, so they could be powered right off the power line voltage, without requiring a transformer.
Hi @James_Knott, great comment and question. I wish I could find out more about the SSEC tubes and choices. It seems that IBM did not publish very much detail on this machine (trade secret perhaps?). Have been researching it for months now. Perhaps deep in IBM's paper vaults is some more detail. Aren't many folks left who worked on this machine directly. I am sure some answers will turn up some day. : )
Remember that the power for the filament in a 25L6 and a 6L6 is the same, so the current in a 25L6 filament is 25% of a 6L6. If you have thousands of the things, the wire savings for a higher voltage could be considerable.
Quickly scanning over some of the text in the video, it appears that the 12SN7s were used in a memory unit, and presumably the 6SN7s elsewhere, perhaps the ALU. It is entirely possible that different people designed the different sections, and may have had personal preferences. Or there may have been other overriding reasons to pick one or the other. I'd again suspect filament current as the reason to choose the higher voltage tubes.
Yeah! As a vintage radio nut I'm disappointed in myself that I missed that! Yeah, you'd expect differing filament voltages in a classic "All American 5" circuit, Not a "super calculator"!
Another great video from CHAP. Thanks guys !
Luckily the transistor was invented. You couldn't really build a practical computer any larger than the SSEC.
wow Spelled W.O.W.
Amazed by the size and the control panel that looks like a telephone switch board.
@LarryRobinsonintothefog, yes, have to agree on that. It really looks like it.
It was probably a "rat's nest" of wires inside like a telephone switch board as well. LOL.
IBM
You might call it AI in it's most early beginning.
I wonder if the Watson super computer was named after the Thomas Watson in this video.
Of Course it was! He was the founder of IBM. Heinz Ketchup is called "Heinz" for the same reason. LOL.
Now our lives are ruled by computers. We feed the insatiable beasts with our very soles now.
It could multiply 15 14-digit numbers in a second! by today's standards, that is not much faster than an abacus!
Still a billion times faster than I can with a modern calculator, Let alone by hand!
Any source code survive for this machine? Or maybe documentation on its instruction set? That would be fun to learn about
Hi @AbAb-th5qe, that is a very good question. Since the SSEC was a one-of-a-kind machine, there was likely a very limited amount of documentation on its internal instructions. Any existing records are probably with IBM Archives, or perhaps with the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, or the Smithsonian in DC. I hope this helps a bit. ~ Victor
@@ComputerHistoryArchivesProject Oh well. More lost history I suppose. The talk of it being available for use by scientists all over the world obviously didn't amount to much.
As we assemble WITHIN this new electronic calculator..... LOL
Edit: Also, smoking a pipe INSIDE a computer..... 🤣😂😅
There's smoke all the time inside of my computer. Maybe I take overclocking a bit too far. LOL.
Was this similar to the computer that Feynman so famously assembled at Los Alamos?
Hi @danlowe8684, Good question. Richard Feynman (1918 -1988) was an American theoretical physicist did brilliant work in many areas. His work on a “connection machine” and other advanced ideas was quite remarkable, and worth researching. I do not think there is any relationship to the design of the SSEC, however. My guess is that he would have thought of the SSEC as a rather simple but fascinating machine for 1948. Feynman was also a pioneering researcher into quantum computing, so he was considerably more advanced in his thinking. ~ Victor, CHAP
i came in during 70s -
these 'punched tape readers' would have been mechanical - why they were so slow. they had 'fingers' that would dip down through the holes and make electrical contact with the platen below the tape. We used this through the early 80s but then optical tape readers finally came into play - much faster and less error rates. believe it or not? we used this tape through the early 90s
fanuc changed everything - took the breath out of stagnant USA manufactures and figured out how to put it on chips (EROM) and the modernization of the core (cheaply implemented, not born by huge waste without direction)
IBM? supported by our bloated government - via our tax dollars - a giant frog that grew so big? it had no pool to swim in.
sad - because we developed all of this - you and I, our parents, our grandparents.
Hi @prestonburton8504, -- thank you for the thoughtful comment! - "fanuc" ? I guess you mean FANUC Corporation of Japan? Very interesting! ~ VK
@@ComputerHistoryArchivesProject Industrial computers - i've had the 'treat' to work on the first -tape-o-matics made by pratt & witney and the forerunner of Ge Mark Century 1 and 100 industrial computers. These were built to create the highly precision turbine bucket blade profiles (before, they were traced via hydraulic tracers like a pantogram. They were all transistor, built from massive arrays of nand gates. We had the lead (America) for 30y, but dropped the ball (allenbradly, westinghouse/bendix/GE et al basicly went into profit mode and didn't see fanuc's first control, the model 5m seen by a GM buffalo engine plant who went to a trade show and saw their booth. He'd just left his plant, an entire celularized machine line consisting of 30 machines feeding one football field sized pallet line in front of them (think engine blocks moving down this line, each stopping at a particular machine for a specific operation) was shutdown while technicians were loading one single machine's executive paper tape -sometimes 4 large 1000ft each 10 inch reels that had to load sequentially and in very specific steps. If one tape had even a single load error (optical reader caught a error) it all had to be redone. He left that show and within several years? all the machines had upgraded fanuc controls. That was when American industrial control market crashed and started becoming distributors of fanuc, yaskawa, toshiba, others. True story.
Hi @prestonburton8504, wow, it sounds like you had some fascinating experience. "Tape-o-Matic" was really back there, early 1960's? Fascinating story. GE Mark Century machines are something I wish we knew more about. They seem to have faded in history. Great story. Thank you for sharing! ~ Victor, CHAP
5:22 he obviously said “spade work”, as in hard labor like shovelling, not “slave work.” Please fix your captioning.
Thank you for that. Listening again you may be correct. We will have to see about correcting it.
Only 75 Years later every Smartphone is a million times faster. The only Question i have, did we achieve this all by ourselves or did we had help by things "falling" from the sky.
It's just humans doing what humans do.
No aliens involved. Just the progression of tech. We went from the first powered flight, (The length of said FLIGHT being LESS than the WINGSPAN of a 757!) to landing on the MOON in 66 years! (1903-1969) 66 years is NOT a long time! America's fist space satellite was launched 66 years ago! (1958) The programming language FORTRAN (STILL in use TODAY!) is one year OLDER than that!