And here in 2019 I just built a relatively low-end gaming PC with 16gb of RAM using affordable consumer-level parts. It's absolutely incredible how far things have come.

Great video! I took the original pictures at 5:37 and 5:40. That was at the London Air Traffic Control Centre. The picture at 5:43 is an IBM 3380 disk drive, which was never a part of the 9020 system, but was used on it's successor in the USA. The core store unit was indeed from the 9020 IOCE, known as MACH store. The main storage elements (SEs) were 512K as you mention, but used a different type of core storage unit, known as a BSM - Basic Storage Module (or "bomb" for some reason). I have one of those. There were eight in an SE, mounted in four pairs.

@CuriousMarc

2 жыл бұрын

Thanks for taking the pictures!

Being into hardware since the late 90's and the IT industry today, I think it makes me even MORE flabbergasted as to how they figured out and implemented all this old school tech back in the day. The engineering capacity needed for some of these builds is amazing.

@orbitingeyes2540

5 жыл бұрын

Maraxius, no one even remembers what Code-Optimization is anymore! Nowadays is just "add more RAM".

@acmefixer1

2 жыл бұрын

The beauty of digital is 64 bits is not much more complicated than 8 bits. It's all in the details.

1969: What are you doing with those 4k of RAM? - Landing a man on the moon. 1972: What are you doing with those 512k of RAM? - Making sure the planes arrive on schedule.

@emielkooij1698

5 жыл бұрын

2019, What are you doing with 512 mb Ram? Looking up a single customer address.

@xishootstuffx

5 жыл бұрын

2019: What are you doing with those 16,000,000k RAM? Wasting time watching the birth of RAM.

@myid9876543

4 жыл бұрын

You mean landing all of the men on all of the things

@janiss2926

4 жыл бұрын

and here i am making phonecalls with 8000000 kb of ram!

@PatrickOliveras

4 жыл бұрын

i tell ya, these programmers are getting lazy

It was heart breaking to see the picture of that magnificent machine chopped in little pieces.

@jpalmz1978

3 жыл бұрын

I think the main expense with running some of these units is the huge amount of power they consume, which is a real fund issue with museums (especially as simply turning some machines off and on can blow old valves)

Wow, what a beast of an installation! It ads some sound perspective to the amazing 1Mb that I had in my first Amiga in the 80s. And to think that these monsters would be chugging along all the way into the late 90s. That’s just amazing.

@lwilton

5 жыл бұрын

The first mainframe I worked on was a 1401 with a whole 8K characters of memory. The next one was a Burroughs B2500 with the relatively gigantic size of 25KB, and a 1MB head per track disk. It could run up to 4 programs at once on top of the MCP (the OS), which took 7KB of the system memory. If we'd sprung for 30KB of memory we could have run CP20 and run up to 20 programs at once. My C64 had more memory than that, and the same clock rate, but could only run one program at a time. And came along almost 10 years later. By the time I bought my A3000 with a full boat of memory I was writing operating systems for mainframes with almost 1 MB of memory that could run 80 programs at once and service literally tens of thousands of remote terminals at once. Times change.

@acmefixer1

2 жыл бұрын

@@lwilton For my college class, I ran my Fortran program card decks on B2700 with the head per track drive, with a horizontal axle IIRC. Humid weather caused the cards to jam in the card reader. 😱😱

@lwilton

2 жыл бұрын

@@acmefixer1 Huh. You must have had that little knife-feed card reader. The old readers that sat on the floor and were about 4 by 6 feet could read rags that would never go thru a knife-feed reader, and were almost impossible to jam. That little reader box wasn't nearly as good, but it sure was a lot smaller and cheaper.

That really interesting window of time when technology progressed from analog to digital. From a more civilized time, before the heady days of the microprocessor and software, before the empire. 😉 very cool piece of 60’s tech. Thanks for sharing!

What's not perhaps well known is that the UK also had one of these 9020 systems. It was installed late in 1973 and lasted until 1990 so it had a good innings. Some of the original software is still in use to this day! I was one of a group of Brits that went out to the FAA training facility in Oklahoma City for a year in 1973 to learn all about the hardware. When we got back to the UK we were operating what for some years was the biggest IBM installation in the UK, if not the whole of Europe!

I worked at Skycraft parts and surplus (orlando florida) in 1979 and we got allot of NASA and there contractors surplus items. I was in charge of teardown. I was only 18 years old and it was a deam job to work on this equipment. We got allot of green radios and huge tape drives. I saw allot of rope memory items but even back in 1979 they were collectors items and sold fast. Keep up the good work on your channel.

5:50 had me dying...I was like wow incredible, they've upgraded the panel lights to chromatic LEDs great job

This X billion, 50yo, 65 tons computer now fits in a 4 gram $2 microcontroller .

@axeman2638

4 жыл бұрын

and uses about 2w compared to the 10s of Kw this would have

@acmefixer1

2 жыл бұрын

The lives of those who flew were depending on it. It was long before the GPS so Radar was the only way to find the aircraft.

When I see pictures of the old computer rooms from the 50s and 60s, it makes me want to have my own setup like that. I have no idea what I’d use it for but maybe I can use both an older and newer server setup, and you can’t forget about the tape drives!

@TheOriginalCollectorA1303

5 жыл бұрын

Admin User That must have been a cool experience even if the actual job wasn’t too demanding. Modern computers are great but sometimes it’s nicer to use older tech.

@stephanesonneville

5 жыл бұрын

It sucks 200KW and it's 500 times slower than a 80s Nitendo

Takes me back to my days at what used to be called Manatee Community College. We had an IBM 1403 printer in the student lab that had an address of 00B (we called it "baby" for the "b") Our IBM mainframe at the time was an IBM System 360/65 with 128K of core memory. Many 3270 terminals were spread around the campus, but us freshmen had to use punch cards. Had to learn how to use the 029 keypunch machines which was a bit of a pain. It only takes one student a semester to drop their deck of unnumbered punched cards to ensure that all other students were very careful with their decks. :-) Love the videos, Marc! Cheers, Pete

OK... it's very early in the morning here, but Ken's neo-pixels fooled me for a second or two.

I look forward to each new video. I have learned so much from you Marc, this knowledge is being lost,we need to preserve it. Thanks for all you do.

RGB on big iron. I love it!

@logang4132

5 жыл бұрын

John Emory Same!

Since then, Master Ken has published a fascinating in-depth article about this memory module and how it was used. Read it at: www.righto.com/2019/04/a-look-at-ibm-s360-core-memory-in-1960s.html

i wait for your videos everyday, thank you for the pleasure you provide to us.

I was co-op at the SLC ARTCC in the early 90s. The primary radar data processors looked even older than this, with discrete 7400 logic, rows of huge cabinets. The backup system was a Raytheon unit installed in the early 80s... it used 74154 ALUs. It was called the DARC... Direct Access Radar Channel, but you were in trouble if you were 'on' the DARC side!

Haha love Kens' dry humor at the end. Very good fella's

Thanks for another great video, consistently the best channel on youtube.

excellent I love all the additional photos and videos

Had a broker call me in 1983 (or so) asking if I could "sew core". This was specifically for the 9020 FAA systems. Naturally I said "no", but the correct answer would have been to offer designing a replacement to the core controller using static RAM. That would have been a great project. Was too busy on doing 308X 3rd-party memory.

I can never get enough of looking and learning about these early "powerful" computers. 💻 I can't wait for the next episode.

@525Lines

5 жыл бұрын

I started working at the tail end of the mainframe era and I've always loved the vintage gear. I'm captivated.

To the fellow that said at 5:42 those were disk drives. They are not. I worked on the memory upgrade on those systems, we doubled the memory To a meg for each processor in a smaller unit. Very interesting setup. I worked on some of that equipment in my service days, 360/20, 360/30 and 40 I spent a lot of time on 1403 printers both models. I was trained on 10 different systems. The new system Z has giga bytes of main memory and terabytes of disk drives in the space of the model 360/40 with 100 times the power. The data transfers on the processor bus is above 256 bits, pc’s today use a 64 bit architecture new main frames are much faster. Nice to see those computer rooms. I had one with 7 system 360/20’s running 24/7 very high maintenance they were card systems.

@hansmuller1625

5 жыл бұрын

It's always interesting to hear from someone who worked on old gear like this. I am envious to have missed that time.

@danteaubert3645

5 жыл бұрын

I think you're wrong. I worked on the 3380 manufacturing line in the 80's at the IBM San Jose plant and the final assembly at South 10th Street in San Jose. Those look just like IBM 3380K's. 2 HDAs per box. Here is another picture: www.ep.ph.bham.ac.uk/general/support/ppgroup-technology-history.html You can clearly see the drive motor, belt and pullies on the right most unit in the video. This would have spun the disks.

@user2C47

3 жыл бұрын

What advantage would a mainframe have over a rack of servers?

@johnmoreton459

3 жыл бұрын

User 2C47 They would be the control system for those servers. I would not want to maintain a server farm. environmental disaster with the heat they produce. A couple of Z15 main frames would handle those servers. If I am not mistaken those servers are 64bit architecture, the main frames are above 256 architecture. They handle data differently.

5:39 "the memory was chopped into little bits" - how ironic.

@richardhead8264

4 жыл бұрын

early clinton server

@markarca6360

4 жыл бұрын

These are part of a vital government infrastructure - and contains sensitive data. It was obviously shedded for national security reasons.

The IBM 9020 is still in use since its reliable and the software is well debugged and will run 24/7 no hiccups secure no worries about Cryptolocker etc..

2:32 I love the detail "Massive storage modules"

I like watching the old computers. I had an original IBM PC in my office up until about five years ago. I tried to donate it to the computer history museum but they said they did not want it. I continue to use it because it ran a DOS version of an accounting program that I was using. Eventually the 5 megabyte hard drive failed and since I could not find anyone that wanted the computer, it was recycled.

FAA - Hey! It's 2019, we're still using that. Give it back!

It sounds like the construction of your secret underground lair is coming along nicely!

OK, You almost had me fooled with that last clip... with the lights flashing! Haaaaaa!!

Yummy !! A great way to finish the week. Bacon & eggs for breakfast and another great video from Marc & the team. I worked in the old London Air Traffic Control Centre when it was in RAF West Drayton along with London Military, and the engineering guys wouldn’t let outside engineers through the gate unless they knew them or the engineer was old n crusty, like me, who understood old systems because, until they moved to Eurocontrol, the stuff powering the centre was very much like this video. If it wasn’t broke, why fix it. Hence decades old kit powering the network !!

@simontay4851

5 жыл бұрын

Old stuff simply just *WORKS* ! No messing about with debugging/fixing it. It just works.

Wow, the tags on the wire harnesses look the same as what IBM was using on the PC and XT!

Too funny, I did some work in one of the FAA long range radar sites near Yoder KS, that fed the data to these systems. They had to take all the raw feeds from the radar and remove the clutter like flock of brids, but not remove something like a slow plane.

I freaking love you guys!

this is amazing !

your garage look fun

These x-rays were perfect :P

Very nice core memory module! What breaks my heart is how they scrap the old equipment (like in 2000) where they just take all of the (historical, rare, and once very expensive) to recycling to be *destroyed!* What a *shame!* For interesting rare equipment, commonly used by the government, to be scrapped, destroyed, and thrown away as opposed to being preserved, is one of my biggest pet peeves!! Thank you for your work in *preservation* of *history!!*

@ChrisDragotta

4 жыл бұрын

CassetteMaster It doesn't really matter.

This is amazing.

The pictures of the 1920's coming out of service were from the UK ATCC installation at London Air Traffic Control Centre, West Drayton just West of London and North of Heathrow - now a housing estate. As far as I remember the UK ATC used the 1920 for flight strip processing, but not for radar display processing. If any of the ex 1920 engineers read this they can correct me if needed.

@John_L

4 жыл бұрын

Ex West Drayton 9020D hardware/software engineer here! Essentially correct - the 9020D did flight and radar data processing but the radar display system was done with multiple PDP11 minicomputers, about 100 of them as I recall. PDP11/34s were used as graphics cards for the displays! You can see a small subset of the 1970s radar display system at The National Museum Of Computing at Bletchley Park.

Yeah, we're just about done! 😎

and these computers worked until 2000 ??? holly cow !

@TheRealColBosch

5 жыл бұрын

Past 2000. I think they were finally removed during the post-9/11 upgrades.

@Patchuchan

5 жыл бұрын

@@TheRealColBosch I wonder if the new systems actually are more reliable.

@TheRealColBosch

5 жыл бұрын

@@Patchuchan Than core memory? Almost certainly.

@GH-oi2jf

4 жыл бұрын

TheRealColBosch - Core memory is pretty reliable. The core memory computers I worked on didn’t have parity bits, let alone error correction. As Seymour Cray once said: “Parity is for farmers.”

At 1:03 is a photo that my grandfather is in and I have an original copy with includes him with one of the machines opened for repair.

@CuriousMarc

5 жыл бұрын

Would it be possible to scan the photo and post it or send it to me? You can contact me via the About... page on my channel.

What are you going to do with these old machines? (meaning what use or purpose will they be put to)

Amazing.

Amazing how they were able to get anything done with so little memory. Hah, they wish they had RGB NeoPixels back then. 😉

@rkan2

5 жыл бұрын

Coding with Assembly or similar probably helps..

@RS-ls7mm

5 жыл бұрын

They wrote programs back then, not apps. No 37 layers of bloatware.

@user2C47

3 жыл бұрын

The neopixel is probably almost as powerful as their entire computer.

What is that place you are shooting videos? Computer or hammer museum?

would it be possible to simulate core memory with a more modern solution to get the AGC working?

@tonyman1106

5 жыл бұрын

other then using flash memory or EEPROM I do not think so.

@acmefixer1

2 жыл бұрын

It's possible, but it would be much easier to draw a graphic of the AGC panel and emulate all its functions with a modern PC.

You are not far from building your own air traffic control room, just need to get a radar !

@MaxKoschuh

5 жыл бұрын

EVERYONE should have that ;-)

How many of these rooms to make the same Gigaflops as a current smartphone?

I'd like to see a micro SD adapter for that system

Which has more memory, the computer on display, or the chip that makes those lights flash? :D

Does this memory make any noise when being written too? I imagine much louder than my eproms but still :)

@acmefixer1

2 жыл бұрын

No, not audible noise. But some guys wrote a program that played a tune on an AM radio held near the computer, due to the radio frequency interference that it emitted.

Overengineered but probably as reliable as it gets. They used native american kids, adept at bead work, to string the rings on the gold wire. That used to be a state secret.

@lwilton

5 жыл бұрын

Likely so. Everyone I ever saw working on the memory production lines was female. I think that for whatever reason women were almost universal for detail hand and eye work in almost every industry. They still are; most of the people on the Chinese factory electronics production lines are female.

@525Lines

5 жыл бұрын

@@jonasthemovie It's mentioned in the book Soul of a New Machine.

@525Lines

5 жыл бұрын

@@lwilton And younger ones, too. A neighbor lady who worked with my mom in the steel mills in WW2 worked in a textile mill when she was a kid in the 20s or 30s.

@mzaite

5 жыл бұрын

Well reliable as long as you had a 24/7 team of technicians to keep them working sure.

@525Lines

5 жыл бұрын

@@mzaite I just think if society collapses, that'll be the only computer memory we can make by hand.

At time stamp 5:42, those are disk drives and not core memory racks.

what SW, would you recomend for archiving old HDDs containing Microsoft stuff (DOS, Windows 9x, NT)Acronis is great but it does not work on 486

@allangibson8494

5 жыл бұрын

Try norton ghost....

@xxycom8963

4 жыл бұрын

I have found Ghost remarkably reliable. I have used it (through its different revisions) since late 90s, till now.

They shredded these like those IBM System X servers used in a NSA project (I think these are to protect national security because it is a part of a vital infrastructure (and to prevent sensitive information from being leaked).

Thumbs up for tape over your webcam. I have tape over my phones camera as well as my laptop. Safety first! ;-)

@user2C47

3 жыл бұрын

Same, but using a reed switch.

Billions of dollars... and to think that nowadays a cluster of a few ESP32s would have more RAM and computing power.

17 ft long for 512kb total storage....which is now something a go pro can record and write 1200 times per second at 16x the resolution

Oh i can see what does "Fishing" meens now!!!

What were some "hacks" and "mods" that may have been done to these older IBM computers?

By the way all those machines were recycled, for the gold content and all the other metals. They don’t use gold anymore.

@myid9876543

4 жыл бұрын

John Moreton we definitely use gold in some places

Have the 4 of you considered becoming a crime fighting team? Solving mysteries using old PC's ;)

super simple

so current small microcontroller can change all those 1970 ATC system...wow...

What do you have for HP systems with core memory? A 2116 and a 2100A?

@CuriousMarc

5 жыл бұрын

I have only one HP machine with core memory: a HP 2116B. I hope we get to restore it soon.

I suspect the old machines were "crushed" to prevent their precious software from being lifted from the memory cores? BBN was required by DOD to use a purge tape about the size of a Dictaphone cartridge tape to scramble the memory when the equipment was decommissioned. I seem to remember that the government was so paranoid (and or didn't understand later computer technology at all) that it was also required on computers/servers which had integrated circuit based RAM.

@acmefixer1

2 жыл бұрын

Rightfully so! RAM can store bits when it's off.

@DandyDon1

2 жыл бұрын

@@acmefixer1 Well apparently not for long? Retention time depends on a lot of things, including the values of neighboring bits. A DRAM bit is a potential well, and it loses its contents by moving charges from or into neighboring areas, so whether there is room in these neighbors matters. Temperature is very important for retention time (which is why cold-boot attacks insist on cold: if you plunge the machine in liquid nitrogen, you can keep the charges in place for substantially longer). At room temperature, typical retention time is counted in milliseconds, at best a few seconds, and, more importantly, the discharge is exponential in nature (it goes in e-Ct for some constant C), as could be expected (capacitors also work that way). So the remaining charge after 2 minutes will be half that after 1 minute; after 10 minutes you are down to a thousandth of the initial charge; after 20 minutes, a millionth; after 30 minutes, a billionth. To sum up: 24 hours... forget it. You won't find meaningful data in DRAM that has been kept unpowered, at room temperature, after 24 hours (even if the room is, say, in Canada). An Experimental Study of Data Retention Behavior in Modern DRAM Devices: Implications for Retention Time Profiling Mechanisms www.pdl.cmu.edu/PDL-FTP/NVM/dram-retention_isca13.pdf

and now you get that gazilion of times in a small piece of silicon

Привет! В моем институте тоже были подобные компьютеры, а на секретном заводе по соседству (название"Хартрон") имелся суперкомпьютер для моделирования динамики движения баллистических ракет (в музее завода нам рассказывали). Но после развала СССР почти все работники остались не у дел. Думаю скоро его закроют.

@maicod

5 жыл бұрын

we don't all understand Russian

@CuriousMarc

5 жыл бұрын

Google Translate to the rescue! (good use of fast modern computing cycles by the way). It thinks it says: "Hello! My institute also had similar computers, and there was a supercomputer at a secret factory next door (the name Hartron) for modeling the dynamics of the movement of ballistic missiles (they told us in the factory museum). But after the collapse of the USSR, almost all workers were out of work. I think it will close soon."

@SiemensSxg75Patch

5 жыл бұрын

@@CuriousMarc Next time I will write in English) You make a very interesting video!

Imagine weaving BY HAND 512 kilobytes of memory.

At first he said Kilobits, but after he said Kilobytes. If they were 512 Kilobytes and there were 17 of these units, that would be .. 8 MB. Wow.I remember holding a tiny 8 MB stick in the early 2000s, and it was a small amount even then. The stick was about half the size of DDR4. I guess the skies weren't as crowded back then...

you can make a 'bit' of core memory with household materials, not much use except for the educational value of doing it

Torn down in 2000. I feel sorry for the people trained in maintaining them only to be obsolete overnight.

@ChrisDragotta

4 жыл бұрын

Lancelot Xavier It wasn't overnight. It was 40 years.

That unit was made the same year I was.... Crap, I qualify as "vintage" now.

I could have told you it was 18 planes! ... Aero-planes 😁🤣 (no, but seriously though)

would these type of technology survive EMP?

@acmefixer1

2 жыл бұрын

These machines made their own electromagnetic radiation interference; they had to survive themselves. Seriously, the Radars put out 5 to 10 million watts peak, so it's most likely the cabinets were well shielded against the Radar pulses.

Who is hammering in the background?

@PetreRodan

5 жыл бұрын

he's got a neighbour that's starting a heavy metal band

@Damien.D

5 жыл бұрын

@@yereverluvinuncleber Yeah there is always strange noises in the background of their lab, in somes videos there was someone playing piano. There is always construction work noises, slight hammering being the least annoying (there is a video shot with mostly continuous jackhammering in the background!). Wonder where they are located. There is also a continuous electric hum but probably coming from their vintage hardware.

Core memory fish :D

LOL... those were the days...... no need to worry about delay down wires or stray inductance....

If the human race and civilization are still around in 50 years and technology continues to advance today's state of the art equipment will seem even more antiquated than this does today. The reason is that when AI reaches a certain point the machines will be designing other machines and the improvements will occur at an increasingly rapid rate, far faster and further than humans could achieve alone.

We forget from what we came from when you open an app to order food... those early computers are really overengineered and just beautiful. The people who designed those modules must have gone mad at some point :D

@scionga

5 жыл бұрын

Not mad, they turned into beautiful butterflies

@Damien.D

5 жыл бұрын

I wouldn't call it overengineered, overengineering being designing a system that can do more than required for the task. Using an hammer to kill a fly is overengineering. It the case of old mainframes like these, it is more a matter of scalling to do the task. These historic computers were slow, memory took lots of volume (hence the name still used today for logical partitions?), so to do the job and to do it reliably, you'd just stack lots of cabinets of computing power and storage. But in background, software was very efficient and elegant, to save any CPU cycle. It is what made these machines so beautiful, reliable and used well beyond their actual technological obsolescence. As Moore's law did its job and CPU exponentially rose in power, any modern computer or even microcontroller is overengineered nowadays, being overpowered for the usage. We use smartphones millions times more powerful than this ATC mainframe to watch videos of cats and writes useless messages on Facebook! And also, gone is the day of carefull programming and cpu cycle economy. High level programming language just ruin the concept of efficiency.

@scionga

5 жыл бұрын

@@Damien.D overengeneering is when you build something for a specific task or job and the design is more complex or has more material etc, than it would be otherwise necessary to accomplish the same task. For example a part being thicker than it needs to be to withstand expected forces.

Love the iphone switches lol

The lights flash. Project COMPLETE. Literally nothing else to do.

Proper hard-core.

Hey, check this one out. Old memory from the computers used in the Soviet OTH radar system. Lots of old vintage electronics scattered about in this video. There's more core memory around the 13min mark. Its worth watching the whole thing. kzread.info/dash/bejne/c2GJurmhZLXQj6g.html

Well there's yer problem - your Apollo core memory is actually a sardine and thats why it dusn't werk :.)

@gorillaau

5 жыл бұрын

The fault was a red herring.

I'm never flying again !!

@user2C47

3 жыл бұрын

Why? A newer system would be marginally better in performance and efficiency, but with a much higher failure rate. Yes, a newer system could have more features, but they would not be allowed to use them. Bureaucracy sucks.

We should thanks to those persons that create such monster pc. They had explored something unknowed. 🤯🇺🇸👍

I smelled a rat when the IBM front pannel lamps started changing colour!

The whole room could be replaced by a TI scientific calculator.

😲😲😀😀👍

0:36 Hmmmm...

0:37 HAHAH

hah im glad i wasnt the guy soldering that thing back in the 70's.

@ChrisDragotta

4 жыл бұрын

brandon woodford They were made by women.

Beefy

Hmm my rasberry pi can do all that.

That fish module is defective