Remembrances of vacuum tube days
As a young teenager, I developed a love for electronics which became a lifelong love affair. In those days vacuum tubes were the norm and solid state devices such as transistors weren't in usage then....
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Wow, a lot of old timers here. :)
I went to work for IBM in 1960 just at the vacuum tube to transistor technology change. Back then, a computer problem could be fixed by turning off the lights and looking for vacuum tubes with their filament out.
I worked for IBM 38 years before retirement during an amazing technology evolution. I often think about how my phone today has way more power and memory than a "mainframe" computer that took up a whole room.
In 1961, the IBM 7090 "mainframe" computer that was the top of the line of their new transistorized computers had 32K bytes of memory and that magnetic core memory alone took up a box larger than a typical refrigerator. I was one of the IBM crew that worked shifts around the clock to maintain this computer used by a Fort Worth, TX aircraft plant in their engineering/design department. Quite a different world.
82 years and counting...
I went to work for IBM in 1960 just at the vacuum tube to transistor technology change. Back then, a computer problem could be fixed by turning off the lights and looking for vacuum tubes with their filament out.
I worked for IBM 38 years before retirement during an amazing technology evolution. I often think about how my phone today has way more power and memory than a "mainframe" computer that took up a whole room.
In 1961, the IBM 7090 "mainframe" computer that was the top of the line of their new transistorized computers had 32K bytes of memory and that magnetic core memory alone took up a box larger than a typical refrigerator. I was one of the IBM crew that worked shifts around the clock to maintain this computer used by a Fort Worth, TX aircraft plant in their engineering/design department. Quite a different world.
82 years and counting...
