Hearing the Word "SSD" from a 1992 video makes it extremly cool!

@ScienceReasonLove

8 ай бұрын

256 million 64 bit words is about 2 GB of storage which, thirty years on, you can get on an SD card for about a buck.

@J.erem.y

8 ай бұрын

Now think about how this technology was used to build the baseline for climate science...

@autohmae

8 ай бұрын

And they had a node in the predecessor of the Internet.

@cdoublejj

8 ай бұрын

i nearly shouted out "jesus christ" that's some serious computing power, like the commercial building sized CAT dozers, thats is wickedly heavy iron and serious performance

@1sonyzz

8 ай бұрын

flash storage existed in late 80's it was just very expensive and not for consumer market

So, an SSD with a capacity of roughly 2 Gigabytes and a performance of 16GFLOPS (double-precision). Pretty impressive for 1988!

@lucasrem

8 ай бұрын

SanDisk, pre flash SSD

@cdoublejj

8 ай бұрын

i nearly shouted out "jesus christ" that's some serious computing power, like the commercial building sized CAT dozers, thats is wickedly heavy iron and serious performance

@TheAnxiousOwl

8 ай бұрын

I wonder how much that would be for the average customer back then (if it were even sold at the time to consumers)

@scottschoppert9149

7 ай бұрын

No consumer would ever use anything like that, this is a super computer. @@TheAnxiousOwl

@Olgasys

7 ай бұрын

It is even more crazy. The "solid state" they talk about at that age is likely RAM based.

I was a large systems Customer Engineer working on most of this IBM or plug compatible hardware in computer rooms / very large data centres like this in the UK. Three terabytes of data was common on large banking systems in 1992. It looks complex and seems daunting, but I was fortunate to enter IT in 1964. Generally well trained before working on new products and overtime grew into maintaining these complex large systems over 45 years in computing. There is no substitute for experience. It was a great, well paid career often working when most people were asleep. I still miss it after being retired ten years.

NCAR's new supercomputer, named Derecho, was inaugurated last month. It's capable of 19.87 petaflops, nearly 20 million times more than the Cray.

@johneygd

8 ай бұрын

Holy fucking shit,now that’s mind blowing,i find this already sooo impressive,however i heard that even today’s smartphones are more powerful then even supercomputers from 1997 ,wich i really really could hardly imagine. I can imagine that the iphone 15 is more powerful then the gray 1 supercomputer but not more powerful or even equel in performances then all those supercomputers combined together in that building,does it?

@Digi20

8 ай бұрын

​@@johneygd it is always very hard to measure performance across different hard and software, but yeah, giving the quoted numbers it can be assumed that a modern high end smartphone is several hundred to even million times quicker (depending on what you want from it) than the CRAY Y-MP machine here in the video. just daily mundane tasks like capturing a 4k video and, in real time, putting a skin filter on top would be something completely unthinkable in 1992. on a sidenote, the raw CPU power of that CRAY wasn´t even so extremely out of this world (that only happened later when super computers started to use thousands of CPUs and GPUs in parallel), i am pretty sure a run of the mil home pc from 10 years later could outperform it. but those computers had (for the time) very wide and fast busses to get all the data in and out from all the attached disk and tape drives. thats something the home pc couldnt have done just a few years later.

@JaapGinder

8 ай бұрын

@@johneygd The point is: not the capabilities of the machine only counts, also the software is neccessary. I don't see an iPhone calculate the weather of tomorrow.... no app will ever do that, I presume. Besides that, the amount of data needed.... But, you'll never know what tomorrow will bring us!

@johneygd

8 ай бұрын

@@JaapGinderwell yeah that’s true,our smartphone wouldn’t calculate tomorrow’s weather or doing number cruching colorizing fotos,or removing objects out of fotos,or breaking music down back into it’s original stems etc,,, If that was the case our smartphones would,ve become bulky with batteries only lasting 15 minutes and it would get overheated because of all that number crunching,that’s the reason why many apps are connected to a supercomputer trough internet to save the iphone for doing all that dirty complex work,phew🤣

@8BitNaptime

8 ай бұрын

Ah but is it as stylish?

Really reminds me of that old Retro Encabulator. The ones that's like "The original machine had a base plate of prefabulated amulite, surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two spurving bearings were in a direct line with the panametric fan"

I love that they read out the models of each device, freaking cool as hell

I think that the scariest part of this video was that I have worked with/for or on most of the equipment in this video, and now I’m feeling very old lol. My laptop with a 4TB SSD and M1Pro processor also has more I/O capabilities than the machines shown here. So many names that we no longer see - Gandalf, Cray, Network Systems, Sun, StorageTek. IBM 3090s and 4480 carts. So many memories, now consigned to history.

@Justincoe

6 ай бұрын

lol Apple

This hardware would have been the cutting edge of cutting edge at the time. Now my iPhone, that I am using to watch this while on the toilet, has more computing power. Amazing.

@624radicalham

8 ай бұрын

But then why aren't Iphones used in data centers today? It's a consumer product. There is still a need to run massive equipment in computer rooms today

@rty1955

8 ай бұрын

Not exactly sparky. How many users can your phone handle?? Now think of how many users these "old" machines handled

@anisalikhan

7 ай бұрын

@@624radicalhamyou say that, but ARM based CPUs in data centers are going to be more and more common. I think ultimately a lot of legacy x86 code will be refactored or rewritten for ARM, the CPU architecture that mobile devices like iOS and Android devices use.

@DAAI741

3 ай бұрын

​@@624radicalhamI think you misinterpreted his comment. He's Just commenting on how much computing has miniaturized

Oddly enough, some of the specs were wrong in this video, as pertaining to performance. The first machine, the 8 processor Cray Y-MP 8d/864 was configured with 512MB of RAM and was capable of 2.16 GFLOPS sustained. The second 2 processor Cray Y-MP 2d/216 machine, with 128MB of RAM was capable of about 514 MFLOPS sustained. While the Cray machines were very cool, the oddly overlooked Thinking Machines CM-2a is easily the sexiest and most exotic of the three, and was capable of around 1.5 GFLOPS sustained, but only with a very carefully coded workload. Altogether, those three machines could muster around 4.16 GFLOPS sustained float64 throughput. The desktop machine I'm writing this on (16 core Ryzen 9 5950x + Nvidia RTX 3080) is capable of 1075 double precision (float64) GFLOPS (610 GFLOPS on the CPU + 465 GFLOPS on the GPU). Mind you, this is like for like double precision floating point, not single precision (of which my machine is capable of over 40 TFLOPS float32 on the GPU alone). Essentially, when it comes to float64 performance, my desktop (which is 2 1/2 years old now) is 258 times faster than all three of those multi-million dollar supercomputers combined! Hilariously, my main desktop in 1992 (which I still have) was an Amiga 3000 with a PDS installed 25MHz 68040 upgrade, giving the machine 3 MFLOPS of raw double precision power (or 358,000 times slower than my current desktop). Pretty crazy how far we've come in the last 31 years.

@estevanmariani4361

8 ай бұрын

AGREED .. when the Thinking Machine CM2 shows up.. im like ..whaaaaaaaaaaa.

@smakfu1375

7 ай бұрын

@@NeverMind-pk4wz First, the Y-MP numbers, along with the modern desktop hardware mentioned (and my Amiga’s 040 FPU) are based on Linpack runs for throughput (not peak) and are roughly comparable benchmarks performing double precision arithmetic. This is not apples and oranges, like comparing MIPS between dissimilar instruction set architectures. Second, modern CPU cores have no problems with immediacy of either register -register or register-memory operations as they have huge physical register files (implemented via queues or reservation stations) that implement register renaming, along with huge tiered cache hierarchies, where even down into shared L3 territory the bandwidth is unfathomable in comparison to a Y-MP’s processor (especially when we’re talking things like core and die interconnects). There’s comparatively little impact from context switching, so much so that not only are modern CPU cores deeply pipelined, wide-superscalar machines, most implement speculative fetch and execute and, in many architectures, SMT to allow multiple simultaneous disparate instruction streams, by exposing two or more architectural front-ends (logical processors) to the operating system for simultaneous scheduling (thread contexts). I’m not even going to delve into the comparatively enormous transistor budgets afforded to SIMD vector (and other SIMD) logic on modern cores. And this is just on the CPU side - when comparing the true heir to specialized vector processors, we get into the MIMD world of GPUs, which offer compute throughput that makes anything we could have dreamt of in 1992 pale in comparison. Finally, when comparing modern CPU cores to the Y-MP’s CPU’s, they’re not actually radically different, nor is the Y-MP particularly exotic. Physical implementation was insane (out of necessity in that era), but logically it’s not impressive by today’s standards. You have scalar instructions, SIMD vector instructions, addressing instructions, along with corresponding architectural and physical registers, and corresponding execution units. In fact, while the Y-MP might have a more elegant ISA, and a far simpler instructions set compared to modern AMD64 and ARM64 (again, out of necessity), the Y-MP was a shared memory multiprocessor machine not at all dissimilar to todays modern chip-multiprocessors (multicore). So yeah you can roughly compare performance when talking about floating point operations, and yes, even basic hardware really is radically more powerful than 30 year old supercomputers.

@nine7295

7 ай бұрын

I bought my Amiga 3000 back in 1991 and I still have it (unused now).

@smakfu1375

7 ай бұрын

@@nine7295 Make sure you remove the Varta battery if you haven't already, or it might end up needing some serious repairs (if you haven't looked, you'd be shocked at the prices 3000's go for nowadays).

@ALFAshizik

7 ай бұрын

👍👍👍👍👍👍🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝

I hope they do a video like this for modern hardware at one point. Numbers will be absolutely nuts, but it has to be filmed on an old camera like this too.

@redline1916

7 ай бұрын

Yeah, no. Unfortunately, most media input these days will either be in the form of barely any information at all on the subject and how the devices work, or they will be specifically designed to be overbearing with none of the same media styles used in the late 80s - early 2000s as these were. I'm afraid that golden era is well lost and over for us.

@hummel6364

7 ай бұрын

@@redline1916 I'm not sure how this film was originally used but it seems to me like it's mostly just an advertisement to scientists who may actually have use for such massive amounts of computation and data storage. (Even today it's still somewhat impressive after all.)

@MinifigNewsguy

6 ай бұрын

@@hummel6364this was shot on video tape…clearly not “filmed”!

Imagine your Samsung S22 delivers nowadays 2500 GFLOPS compared to the 1 GFLOP of this CRAY supercomputer in 1992. We literally carry around pocket size supercomputers today. Mindblowing.

The industrial design of those machines is something else...

This is so impressive for the time! What a neat capsule into the past!

My Jellyfin server has 60TB, in 3 20TB HDDs. Its wild how much space (rooms) 26TB used to take up.

@jbgaud

8 ай бұрын

But not 8000 processors

@autohmae

8 ай бұрын

@@jbgaud and still far more computing power

@wedgie502

8 ай бұрын

@@jbgaud funny you should say that. the Nvidia 4090 has 16384 CUDA Cores. You can count each core as an individual processor.

@ruadeil_zabelin

8 ай бұрын

@@jbgaud It doesn't really need that. You can do these things now on a handfull of GPUs

@mqsv

10 күн бұрын

Actually the rate of cost per GB has tapered off a bit. If storage prices/technologies has improved at the same rate as in the 1990s, we'd have...I just a rough guess, $1 petabyte drives by now. We still have warehouse sized computers to support our every-day technology (can you use your phone/laptop offline much? If not, every time you go online you're interacting with google, amazon, facebook, etc. with their massive data centers.

Pretty funny. I was with a company installing an alarm system in a very large data center back in 1974. There was a note taped to one particularly menacing looking computer that read ...It would take 100 employees working 100 hours to correct all the mistakes this machine can make in 10 seconds, so for God's sake BE CAREFUL!

I hope the person who narrated this video is still with us. He sounds excited for the future of computing.

So cool! The time when 4 Gb was mind-boggling huge!

Wow, and now I have similar data capacity and computing power in my desktop computer. What a time to be alive.

23TB stored on 100,000 tape cartridges. Today you can get that on a single LTO tape that costs about $50!

@JV-pu8kx

8 ай бұрын

The comparison I like to make: in the mid nineties an entire encyclopedia could be put on a single CD-ROM. That would be 650 MB of data. Today, a single micro-SD can hold _many_ times that! But, shrinking all those tape cartridges is an equally impressive leap in data storage technology. Even more impressive? Imagine a refrigerator-sized hard disk holding _one_ megabyte of data, compared to today.

@rty1955

8 ай бұрын

Imagine if that tape went bad hahaha

@Dr.W.Krueger

8 ай бұрын

@@rty1955 magnetic tape will definitely last longer than any mechanical / solid-state drive.

@vylbird8014

8 ай бұрын

@@Dr.W.KruegerCaveat: Magnetic tape has a very long lifespan *if properly stored*. It can last decades. It is very sensitive to storage conditions though, and that life will be greatly shortened if it isn't kept at the ideal temperature and humidity.

@rty1955

8 ай бұрын

@@Dr.W.Krueger this is true, but what happens when the drive chews the tape? Thats a LOT of data to lose

Crazy that the best way to output graphics was to load them onto an analog chemical cine film format. I've been fascinated by old computers for years but had no idea that's how fancy graphics of the timr might have been displayed.

@mcpr5971

8 ай бұрын

The digital video formats barely existed at the time. And since TV was analog, it makes sense they output analog to film and tape.

@stringercorrales6627

8 ай бұрын

Call the receptionist and tell her to give me the film processor so I can develop kino c-41 pictures.

For perspective, that next year my dad couldn't get DOOM to run on our computer because it was too crappy. We had literally bought it the same year this tape came out.

@Shrek_Has_Covid19

8 ай бұрын

and today people would be surprised if you couldn't run it on a calculator

Magical. In my career, I always wanted to go into weather/CFD modelling.

What complexity! Incredible diversity of devices, computer technologies and architectures designed by top engineers. I'm a bit nostalgic of this era, thinking that a CFD datacender nowadays is simply made of farms of PCs with powerful Nvidia graphics cards.

Computers had style back then. All look like genuine Hollywood items. Also the disk retrieval machine reminds me of a robot from a movie.

@IntelCoreI77700K

8 ай бұрын

They still use disk retrieval machines in many data centers today. Mainly for archival purposes

@MN-Hillbilly

8 ай бұрын

​@@IntelCoreI77700KIn Panama in 1991 we had a tape retrieval machine in the Army. His name was Private Boone.

@vinylcabasse

8 ай бұрын

love the random patterns on that thinking machines unit. i assume 8192 LEDs, one showing the status of each of the parallel processors

@qdaniele97

8 ай бұрын

​​@@vinylcabasseOriginally they were designed to work exactly like that, but it would've meant that in a perfectly working machine the led panel would've remained unassumingly solid red most of the time (all CPUs working and none idle) and Thinking Machines designers, always remembering the importance of the "rule of cool", decided to change it to make them blink randomly like the computers in most scifi movies 😁 (I believe they kept the ability to switch it back to the "boring mode").

@vinylcabasse

8 ай бұрын

@@qdaniele97 makes complete sense, and that's awesome, lol

Wow we have come so far in 31 years, thanks for the view of the past

SSD, Terabytes,… by the time, nobody would ever have thought about that being in private houses in a time not even that far away

@MobCat_

8 ай бұрын

26TB of "cold storage" (all the stuff on those 100,000 tape carts in '92) is still a lot of data for people now days. It's only like 3 hdds now days. But still a lot of data.

@madriditunes7021

8 ай бұрын

​​​@@MobCat_Nice video 🥰 but not for VR.... I have almost 20 Tera of VR videos in 8K 😂 more interesting in a size of shoe box 😂 it's like micro SD 16mb vs 512GB...Imagine what it will be like in 100 years.

@dg-hughes

8 ай бұрын

I got a 1.2GB drive around 1995?? and thought I was living in the future but 24MB RAM (a lot for the time) and a 486DX2 66MHz CPU (Pentium 1 was out at the time).

@0xD1CE

8 ай бұрын

@@MobCat_ Not even 3. Western Digital's Ultrastar DC HC670 is a 26TB hard drive. Seagate and other brands are already working on releasing a 28-30TB HDDs.

@BlownMacTruck

8 ай бұрын

Why does everyone post crap like this? Actually plenty of people thought that. Just because you’re too dumb to understand how time and tech work doesn’t mean everyone else is on that low level.

Very cool video.. Just comparing then to now (2023) in just storage alone that took vast room (28TB), now fits in the palm of your hand in just two drives, That is an incredible amount of storage and to deal with some of it to place it on film or VHS tape. Mind blowing then and today.

30 years later, we have mobile devices that can do things far beyond what was imaginable to anyone at this time period

@dillon1012

8 ай бұрын

Right now the average desktop is about as fast as a supercomputer from the mid to late nineties! (From Top500 1997, the fastest supercomputer was about 1 Tflop, with the average being around 20 Gflop)

@miasmator

8 ай бұрын

They could do if the software wasn't utter crap..

@hexagonist23

8 ай бұрын

Mine is as fast as 1998-2004 supercomputers. It's an uh, above average desktop.

@BlownMacTruck

8 ай бұрын

Uh no. It wasn’t beyond pretty much anyone’s imagination. Tech moves at a rapid pace, and only idiots on KZread who want upvotes post dumb comments that think otherwise. Or do you think 30 years from now we’ll have the exact same tech level and speed?

@kasel1979krettnach

8 ай бұрын

ZZ's comment is default (and boring) under every computer history video. In the case above it is quite off as well, as many phones don't have Terabytes of storage ( I think, I don't know how much storage my iPhone has, nor do I know what model it is...) @@BlownMacTruck

Awesome video. A bit saddening to think all these beauties may have been sent to the scrape-yard.

@AS-R-bx3zi

8 ай бұрын

That the sad thing about innovation, computer hardware become outdated fast. Lucky moderns computer are designed to be upgraded with new hardware.

@ruadeil_zabelin

8 ай бұрын

@@AS-R-bx3zi not as much as you'd hope. I wouldn't be able to replace my cpu with a newer one since the socket changed. I wouldn't be able to just get an RTX4080 without first replacing the power supply, and that is assuming my motherboard doesn't cause some kind of issue with it. I wouldn't be able to slot in new faster ram since it is now DDR5 instead of the DDR4 from ~2 years ago. In other words.. for a proper upgrade, I still end up replacing the whole thing.

@thetechdudemc

8 ай бұрын

There are a handful of museums out there with the aim of preserving these systems, and minicomputers like PDP-11's are a frequent exhibit at vintage computer festivals

@mitchell.9632

6 ай бұрын

@@ruadeil_zabelin frame work laptop is upgrade-able to an extent.

It's amazing how impressive this stuff was back in its day, today I have more power, memory, and storage in the desktop machine next to me. What cost millions can be had today for under $2k

Picture of Cray in thumbnail, my geek flaired out of control. Excellent video.

Impressive for the time. Looking at this now, this all looks ancient but to think that this video was in my lifetime 😳🤯

Takes me back to a previous life where I managed a robotic tape library.

They did so much research with so little computer power, almost makes you feel guilty for having a computer a gazillion times more powerful just sitting quietly in your bedroom solely for gaming purposes.

I worked in a similar type of facility in 1997, except it was mostly IBM mainframes. Admittedly, it was out of date by then, but very hard to replace. It was always interesting to see a mainframe cracked open, revealing an OS\2 workstation inside. In my case, the storage was mostly tape (8-track). We had a library of over 800,000 and it was NOT automated. When a system called for a tape, you had to go find it and manually insert it. On a busy night it was quite a workout. Don't even get me started on backup night. This was a.... let's say secure facility. I had no idea what the computers were actually doing even when I had interface access through a console to complete tasks.

@jovetj

7 ай бұрын

I was a mainframe operator for about 5 years, so I can relate. I am sure we did not have as many tape cartridges as you, but some days it sure felt like it. I actually remember what I was doing at 2000-01-01 T00:00:00... I was mounting a tape!

@timmy7201

6 ай бұрын

I would argue that IBM has the longest track record, of being most "outdated" of all tech companies still in existence...

@jovetj

6 ай бұрын

@@timmy7201 If that's true, then why do they file THE MOST patents each and every year? Of anyone!!

@timmy7201

6 ай бұрын

@@jovetj Ever heard of patent trolling or patent hoarding? IBM doesn't use those patents, besides suing other companies for infringements. They just stifle research and innovation..

1992 was the year I left college and started working in IT. At home I had just invested in my first ever hard drive, a 20mb unit (actually a hard-card) for my ibm compatible machine at the cost of around 1 weeks wages. Sat in my home office now I'm looking at a WD 4TB drive that cost less than 1 days wages and has 64mb cache memory thats more than that first drive had storage!!

@raccoon681

8 ай бұрын

Don't forget the space on your micro sd card. The size of raisin yet vastly more storage then there massive 5.2 gigabyte units shown.

@nine7295

7 ай бұрын

In 1991, I bought a 100MB SCSI quantum HDD to upgrade the 52MB HDD inside my Amiga 3000. I think I paid about $300 USD then, not exactly sure now. I still have that unit.

Remember the clack-clack-clack sound walking near one, knew it was elevated for the cables but didn't know it was probably anti-static.

Old computers look so cool. That segmented black cube with red (I'm assuming CRT, though it could be plasma) is sucha striking image.

seeing the 3490s takes me back, this is when IT was pretty specialist as an operator, and data centres actually looked like youd spent money on serious power lol

Oh - that brings back memories! Mostly fond ones too. Two of us on shift one day worked out how to stack the tape cartridges across the tape drives we had to maximize throughput (so we had a tape already loaded as opposed to having to wait for a tape to unload/load). Nobody could understand how we managed to get work through so fast with just the two of us! As for ACS, I managed to argue against having them (robot arm was a single point of failure as it was also responsible for passing through tapes to another unit via the pass-thru port - and we needed at least 2 units). Went with IBM libraries instead (which had parallel tracked robot arms, so an arm failure didn't necessarily stop the library from working).

around the time of this video, I worked for one of the supercomputers centers run by NSF in Princeton NJ. While we had access to crays on the network, we mostly used CDCs and had one of the few ETA10g's which at the time was more powerful. (Specs are on wiki somewhere, but safe to say your cell phone can outperform it now) One day I had used telnet (ssh was not the thing yet) to edit some files on a Cray using emacs. There was such a clear improvement in behavior over the VAXstations and Sun 2s we using locally that I just kept editing the entire project that way. A few days later I got called on the carpet for using a huge chunk of budgeted cpu time for emacs. :-) These you just expect computers to keep up with you when typing, but in those days it was just expected to have to type slowly or wait for the computer to catch up.

@emanuelgoncalvessantos4499

8 ай бұрын

Tks for sharing your experience

@railgap

7 ай бұрын

editing files directly on a Cray, huh?

@molnaredmond

7 ай бұрын

Your time was clearly not as valuable as the Cray's.

My wife loves pinball machines and was absolutely enthralled by this video. Thank you so much for making it.

That computer is fast! It's CRAY-CRAY!

Thank you so much for this video! I love seeing more footage of the Connection Machine especially.

...I so remember this. Such a trip back in time...glorious.

I freaking love videos like this. It really gives a perspective on how amazing our tech is nowadays. That thing could do 1 billion FLOPS. My 7 year old graphics card can do 5 TRILLION FLOPS. In the size of a book, not an entire floor of a building. What an amazing time to be alive.

This video is great - I wish I was around to enjoy this era in person, sadly just a few years too late. So much variety in supercomputing back then.

I was hoping for this to be an analog horror masterpiece. Instead I got educated

Where is the turbo encabulator?

@jakobole

8 ай бұрын

Hidden begind the panelectric fan. You know - to avoid side-fumbling.

Now days, your phone is more powerful than those 90s super computers!

SSD in 1988, nice

Hearing the word terabyte in 1992 just absolutely blows my mind,i was already mind blown away once i heard about a 1terabyte harddisk drive back in 2015,but these days we already have 1terabyte usb sticks,heck even my 8 year old laptop ssd drive is not 1 terabye, In fact ssd drives were ridiculously expensive back in 2010 and didn’t had much storage then the cheaper but higher capacity harddisk drives,these days ssd drives seems to be sooo common and harddisk drives seems to become obsolete and outdated these days,right???

@michaelr9627

8 ай бұрын

Yeah, more or less anyway. For the average consumer even an inexpensive SSD is the way to go when building or ordering a computer. The performance benefits coupled with ever improving pricing is thankfully creating an ecosystem of modern devices that aren't lobotomized by their mass storage. I still have plenty of spinning rust in use but most for my own storage and archival needs. Hard drives still have their place for mass storage however the days of being a valid boot drive are a bit behind us... thankfully!!! >.

@miasmator

8 ай бұрын

Hard drives are still useful if you store lots of pirate movies and TV series. The price per TB is three times lower (five times if you need drives that are larger than 16 TB). Keep in mind that you will need SATA port multiplier capable motherboards and more drive backplanes with lower capacity drives.

@oldtwinsna8347

8 ай бұрын

hard drives still needed for more reliable long-term backup purposes. ssd's need refresh electrical power so they cannot sit around indefinitely unplugged from the wall. hard drives, meanwhile, can in fact sit detached and perform flawlessly if they were in that state to begin with.

@johneygd

8 ай бұрын

@@oldtwinsna8347 how long will it take for an ssd drive to devsy? I have heard that the newest ssd drives could hold data for 100 years,but i || take that with a grain of salt, In such case i may better off burning all that stuff on a rom chip in case am worried about my data or make multiple backups on usb sticks.

@michaelr9627

8 ай бұрын

@@oldtwinsna8347 hard drives honestly should be used for cold storage either as they are still subject to bit rot unless you gave a managed storage pool scrubbing the data. At that point the disks are spinning 24/7 so it's important to by properly rated drives. Real archival storage would be something along the lines of a tape backup. Though a combination of different mediums can achieve the goal of proper data retention and speed of access.

Back when I was in the University of Illinois just 5 years later I spent a good amount of time ripping out the remnants of a lot of similar, but not as extensive, deployments like these. Pretty much everything except for the raised floors and CRAC units was obsolete.

Please forgive the following little vintage computer anecdote, I know very little about computers, especially at this level but I love to watch material on cutting edge computing from the past. In our family business back in the 80's we had a network system based on what was then cutting edge for small users, a 286 file server, wow! It had custom written business software because, for that time, we had quite a difficult application. So, the system had been installed for about 8 months and one afternoon the guy from the supplying company who did routine software maintenance as part of the service contract, called me to advise that he needed our authorization to install a larger hard drive as we had almost filled the original. It was going to be quite expensive as it needed to be double the size, from 10MB to an incredible 20MB!! Makes me smile now to think of how significant that was then to what almost everyone has at their fingertips now! I still have the file server, must have a chip count in the hundreds, but it still works! And one last thing about that system, it was £12,000 in 1988, for an 8 user system!!

Very, very interesting. Thank you for uploading.

367kw power requirement!! Damn!

I remember being wowed by another documentary about weather forecasting featuring this computer when I was at school. “One billion floating-point operations per second!” For only £10,000,000 or so. Wow! So to obtain the same raw speed as the GPU in an Apple Studio with an M2 Ultra… …which you can buy in a couple of minutes online for £5200… …and have delivered to your door by a standard parcels delivery company. Tomorrow… …you would just need to spend… …the GDP of Portugal or so. 😮 (faints)

The Cray disks were apparently made by Ibis, a Silicon Valley company which at the beginning specialised in IBM plug-compatible disk storage, but later developed special dual-channel hard disks for supercomputers.

06:55 in 1992, 26 TeraBytes, in 100000 cartridges. Today, 32 TB cheap NAS for a ridiculously affordable price that you can carry anywhere

@sarahwilliams755

8 ай бұрын

I have 16TB in just one MacBook Pro in the form of two 8TB which I great when had to move from hotel to hotel, could take all my music, films, games and documents with me. And the really crazy thing is that I could up grade it too 24TB by losing the thunderbolt chip and installing a M.2 drive mod chip. I could go much higher in drive space but the cost is just to high. It’s even more crazy that we have all this technology today from when this video was recorded who far can we go?

And just 22 years later this was a normal spec for a phone in millions of pockets. Crazy.

The most interesting part was the robotic hard drive swapper, which I think is still impressive even for today.

3:22 Wow, that red cube with the red flashing lights looked like it would house the evil AI "Red Queen" from the 2002 film Resident Evil :D

ooof one of my NVME's stores that data in a fraction of the time.I can't wait to see what in is store in the next 20 years

thank you for uploading. reminds me somewhat of how our render farm at mental images looked around 1990, including that battery room(that caught fire once). the climate control system made it unbearable to work for long in there, so the admins had their terminals in an adjacent room.

@stringercorrales6627

8 ай бұрын

Can I have the film processor?

@smb3d

7 ай бұрын

Oh man, I used Mental Ray for many years with Maya until around 2006-7 when we switched to VRay. Those were the days. Final Gather flicker was the bane of my existence.

Cool. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks for your sharing

All I really get from this is my desktop PC would be the size of a building in 1992. I do wonder what ended up happening to all this equipment.

@theaustralianconundrum

6 ай бұрын

Scrap! VERY expensive equipment turned into VERY cheap scrap! None of these old systems were kept. 99% are now part of your car or the plumbing in your new home. LOL

The narrator mentions 1992 many times so pretty sure this video originated in 1992.

@spacedock873

8 ай бұрын

Yes he does, but if you look at the copyright message at the end it is dated 1988!

@mitchell.9632

6 ай бұрын

@@spacedock873 It also said version 3.0 at the beginning.

Fastforward to 2023, now I have nearly 100TB in my closet for my personal cloud..... if only these guys could see what we have now, they would have wet dreams!

Went to the Livermore supercomputer center just 5 years later showed how quickly things changed though.

The only thing that exceeds our reliably hubristic exuberance about the incredible scale of newly available computational power is our retrospective embarrassment at our own previous excitement over what now can literally fit in a matchbox just few short decades later!

Just 30 years later we have more powerful computers in our freaking pockets, computers the majority of humanity uses solely to upload stupid crap on tik tok and sh*tpost on reddit. What a time to be alive.

Got to be the best looking and probably most expensive bench in the world at that time

Wonderful history

Damn - computers were pretty in those days

Ok this was cool. Bleading wdge for the time .......the thinking machine. Omg.....dude. This is sick look at how big that room is

Super Computer systems have come a long way in the last 31 years since 1992. It would be interesting to know how many years this computer system was in service before it was finally shutdown and removed from service and replaced by a newer system.

Even had built in seating!

I remember playing my games from floppy disks so I could save room on my hard drive.

Now it is no problem to have 50Terabytes as home storage in a box under the table.

It's pretty insane that a smartphone you can hold in your hand now has more processing power and many times more RAM than this room filling 'super computer'. 😅

Looking at some of these giant multi gigabyte hard drives while I have a 4TB hard drive sitting on a shelf next to my tv.

It's fun to stay at the Y-MP 8 It's fun to stay at the Y-MP 8

The IBM PC-AT on a desk (7m44s) did not warrant a mention… Who would have imagined at this point that it would take over high performance computing?

Hard to believe that today's high end smartphones can perfom the same number of calculations per second as this PC behemoth in 1992!

I worked on the automated library system.

Basically cloud computing ahead of time ;)

I have two 16tb, eight 18tb, and four 20tb drives just sitting here within a couple of square feet section of my desk. I'm comtemplating how much more of this hardware would be required to match that and it's blowing my mind.

My phone has a 256 GIGAByte SSD and a processor that does 1.5 TERAFLOPS with a GPU running at an estimated 19.5 TFLOPS, and it fits in the palm of my hand. Oh how far we’ve come.

Back when computers looked cool 😞

Omg a Thinking Machine! I used those! Inmos CPU's!

와 지금은 노트북이랑 스마트폰이 저 어마어마한 건물 통째로 쓰고있는 컴퓨터보다 성능이 훨씬 좋네... 미친 기적의 시대... 불과 몇십년전 100조 100억짜리 컴퓨터를 이제 100만원에 쓰는 시대...

4TB!!!! Less than a single HDD today ...

and now more computer power in your smart phone than that whole server room lol

Liminal Gorgeousness

so 2 gig ssd in 1992, imagine what tech they have today then.. in technology we are 20-30 yrs behind

this is. what i would love

SUN systems is still one of the most beautiful logos ever

I've gone from working with an IBM System 3 to wondering if I should save this video on my spare 1 TB SSD. Wild...

build a gaming pc inside that old computer casing would be sick! XD