Article: A Trillion Trillion Terabytes ...

[Christoph C. Feldhaim]

I have seen this IT development since my schooldays where I learned programming with a
Tandy Z80 Computer and the memory of the main computer in a large company where we
had an excursion to was wires and little magnet rings in a frame.
Eris sums it up.
But the best are the images.
Gorgeous.
Cheers
~Chris

[graphius]

Seconded on the images. They are succulent.

I have also watched technology change from the faltering steps in the 1980's to the giant leaps of today. It will be interesting to see where we go in the next 20 years... I hope I can keep up...

[Hans Kruse]

The pictures are great and a joy to watch. The story relates to me as well since before becoming a photographer I was in the IT industry for some 30+ years from paper tape to TB's!

I just reminded to start up my first color screen PowerBook 540c from the mid 90'ies and running OS version 7.5.5 which still can start up and the old Internet explorer browser can show some of the websites of today although only partially as it does not like the scripts and the pictures are 256 colors and it takes for ages to load a page   Well, I could not find a newer browser that would run on the machine. Most of the HW I have used does not exist any more, but I kept the 540c.

[Telecaster]

Got my IT start in the mid-1970s on our school district's IBM 1130 "mini" computer. (It only took up half a room.) Hollerith cards. Learned FORTRAN & COBOL in prep for university. Spent a lotta time modeling drag racing car behavior for a FORTRAN game...visited my high school years later and found the game had been ported over when the district switched to DEC machines.    I never took any photos of the data center...wish I had. My friend Dale & I co-owned a "Trash" (Tandy) 80 too. Cassette tape storage.

Edit: forgot to mention that Eric Meola will be forever in my good graces for his Born To Run cover pic.     (Not to mention the great photos that finally appeared with The Promise.)

-Dave-

[Jan K.]

A Trillion Trillion Terabytes ... 

Most are probably users moaning over Adobe... 

[Rajan Parrikar]

Lovely little essay, outstanding images.

[tom b]

An interesting aside is that the road to Mandalay is not actually a road but it is the Irrawaddy River.

Cheers,

[wolfnowl]

Great images, and memories of computers. I still remember, back in High School, registering for a 'Computer Fundamentals' elective course. It was cancelled for lack of interest. A server at a café complained that their debit card machine is so slow because it's on 'dial-up'. She has absolutely no idea!

Mike.
(who still has a slide rule, and mostly remembers how to use it).

[fdisilvestro]

Great essay and stunning images, Eric Meola has been on my short list of Colour Masters for quite a while.

I just have some reservations about those statistics on how much information is uploaded to the internet or images to Facebook as they only reflect quantity not quality. In my experience there is a considerable amount of duplicated and useless information. There might be 72 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute or 500 Terabytes of data added everyday to Facebook, but how much of that really stands out?

It is not uncommon for a photographer to capture thousands of images for an assignment and then select just a few. Those few are what counts, the remaining are just quantity, numbers.

Btw, I also lived the IT evolution, started programing with punched cards, then wiring my own boards based on Intel 8085 architecture and now my PC has over 4TB of storage space. 

Regards

[Chris Kern]

I had no idea there were so many other IT antiques antiquarians inhabiting Lu-La-Land.  My introduction to computer programming took place in 1965 on BASIC v. 1.0 in courses taught by the language's co-inventors, John Kemeny and Tom Kurtz.  Thanks to Michael and Kevin for publishing Eric Meola's piece; it's useful every now and then to reflect on how far we've come.

For those who can recall mainframes, drum storage, punch cards and the "paper-rapers" which would sometimes spew out hundreds of pages of diagnostics after an overnight batch program run, the story of "Mel, A Real Programmer nicely captures the spirit of the era.

[amolitor]

Exponential growth curves are all just sinusoids that haven't grown up yet. Basic diffyqs.

[Alan Klein]

I have seen this IT development since my schooldays where I learned programming with a
Tandy Z80 Computer and the memory of the main computer in a large company where we
had an excursion to was wires and little magnet rings in a frame.
Eris sums it up.
But the best are the images.
Gorgeous.
Cheers
~Chris

Where is the link?  Can't find it.

[wolfnowl]

If you're looking for the link to Eric's post, it's here: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/essays/a_trillion_trillion_terabytes.shtml

Mike.

[Alan Klein]

After I got out of the USAF in 1967, I went to work for Univac, Div of Sperry Rand Corp, the makers of the original Eniac.  I was installing and maintaining Univac 494 main frames. that used discrete components.  One of the main storage devices at that time was a Fastrand II, 99 mb random access drum system that weighed over two tons.  Each unit had two huge drums with magnetic nickel cobalt coating.  It cost about $200,000 in 1967 dollars.  When one of the 64 read/write heads would hit the coating (they normally floated over it), the heads would retract to prevent further damage.  We would have to take the cover off and find the "hit".  We would use a volcano pumice stone and other fine sand paper to smooth the kink out of the coating left by the hit.  The sector would be deleted from writing/reading and the unit would be restored to operation. 

Yes, we've come a long way.

[Rajan Parrikar]

After I got out of the USAF in 1967, I went to work for Univac, Div of Sperry Rand Corp, the makers of the original Eniac.  I was installing and maintaining Univac 494 main frames. that used discrete components.  One of the main storage devices at that time was a Fastrand II, 99 mb random access drum system that weighed over two tons.  Each unit had two huge drums with magnetic nickel cobalt coating.  It cost about $200,000 in 1967 dollars.  When one of the 64 read/write heads would hit the coating (they normally floated over it), the heads would retract to prevent further damage.  We would have to take the cover off and find the "hit".  We would use a volcano pumice stone and other fine sand paper to smooth the kink out of the coating left by the hit.  The sector would be deleted from writing/reading and the unit would be restored to operation. 

Yes, we've come a long way.

Within walking distance of me is the fantastic Computer History Museum (in Mountain View, CA) -

http://www.computerhistory.org

My friend Thomas Pindelski recently wrote a 2-part account of his visit -

http://pindelski.org/Photography/2014/04/03/computer-history-museum-part/

http://pindelski.org/Photography/2014/04/04/computer-history-museum-part-ii/

[BernardLanguillier]

Thanks for the interesting read and nice photographs!

Most of us having had the chance to grow up in a developed country 40+ years ago have gone through the same route and vividly remember some key steps on the way (mines were Commodore 64, Amiga 500,... I have always loved the guys with the better technology ).

Big data has become a market segment for a reason.

The irony being that the more data we create in attempts to somehow understand, the farther away we are from being able to directly access this data. But yes, we can hope that a digitized world where every atom has a corresponding set of bytes somewhere may be easier to forecast. Call it the Internet of Things, call it Big Brother,...

And isn't it pretty much the essence of it all ? The core human desire to escape from the grasp of time, immediate access to any moment in the past, easy projection ahead in the future to help make a better present. Our own memory becomes less important than the knowledge of pointers enabling us to re-experience it?

My only fear is that we may all end up forgetting that humans only have for real the ability to live in the present time.

Cheers,
Bernard

[Schewe]

Yeah, ya know...when I was a kid, we had to walk 10 miles (uphill) in 10 ft snow just to attend a one room schoolhouse heated by coal.

Ok...not really true (although I did walk home from work one day, 10 miles, after an ice storm)...

Yeah, we've got it pretty darn good now...we look the gift horse in the mouth, over and over without batting an eye over how things have changed.

My first computer assembled assignment was in 1984. I sent 2 8x10 chromes to a place called Digital Transparency Inc. run by Rafael (a chem based retoucher from NYC who married a computer geek from Houston TX). I got back an 11x14 chrome that I put a loupe on and said, well, this changes everything!

And, it did...it just took about 10 years...

My first Mac was bought off the back of a semi in 1984 (the original Mac 128K). I had already used a Commodore 64 for a couple of years (and logged onto AOL and Compuserve via dialup–@ 300 baud).

My first imaging workstation was a Mac Quadra 950 with 64 MBs of ram with Photoshop 2.0. It was really cool but also sucked big time...run a filter then go out for lunch and come back and there was still a progress bar (unless OS 6.x had crashed or hung).

My first Photoshop was version 2.0 (updated to 2.01 to reduce crashing). I talked my wife into letting me buy $20K in computers that we couldn't afford to buy a system that would allow me to do digital imaging. My first job paid for my system.

I haven't pulled the trigger on a new MacPro (black trash can) yet...I'm waiting for a bit more TB2 stuff to come out. But I played with a new MacPro at an Apple store. Course, I had to tell the Apple "genius" they really wanted to upgrade to Photoshop CC cause Photoshop CS6 doesn't use the built in video cards very well. And of course, they didn't have Lightroom installed...but they did have Aperture (I didn't bother to launch it–why would I :~).

[Alan Klein]

It's great sharing old stories with all you old guys!   Here's another memory story that I just remembered.  (there's something psychological in that sentence.) 

Again when I was with Univac, my first assignment was to help install a new main frame computer with magnetic core memories in CIA  headquarters in Greenbelt, Maryland.  Of course we were all cleared through when we got to the building.  During the installation process, we had to run some complex memory tests.  They failed.  The bi-stable magnetic core memory boards were tens of thousands of dollars each.  So we had to swap it out with a new one which we  brought with us as spare.  Well that worked out pretty well.  But the CIA would not allow us to remove the defective one to return to our plant even though it had never been used by them.  I assume they burned it along with all there other disposables all at taxpayer expense.

[Chris Kern]

Again when I was with Univac, my first assignment was to help install a new main frame computer with magnetic core memories

Very cool technology—although, as you point out, fragile and prone to hardware failures.  I have a framed chunk of core sitting on my desk (see attached).

[Alan Klein]

Chris:  yes that's what they look like except much bigger.  When I worked for Sperry Rand, I went to their school in St Paul and saw their factory.  At one point we watched them making core memories.  She had this metal template about 16" square with all these little slots to line up the cores.  she then pulled out a little jar that had about a million cores.  The template block was placed on a suction machine.  She then sprinkled the cores from the jar over the template jig and the suction would pull the cores in place.  Then they would hand string a wire from one side to the other through each row and column of cores and then obliquely for the sense lines.  You can see these in your picture.  Amazing and fascinating hand process like stitching a rug.