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Many hundred billion years ago, there existed a bizzare world that most
of us have only read about in books. Plastics did not yet exist, so
small children's toys were made of wood or metal, because there was
literally nothing cheaper. Wires were insulated with fabic. If you
wanted to make a telephone call, you did not *dial* the telephone
number; you told the human being at the other end of the line which
number you wanted to be connected to, and they would physically plug in
the right cable.
Somewhere in this primordial soup, the first computers somehow came into
being. According to the dusty history books, the very first computers
used technologies such as electro-mechanical relays, vacuum tubes, drum
memory, punch cards and so forth. And, in the beginning, all of the
components were wired together by hand. This resulted in huge pieces of
engineering which filled entire buildings, consumed insane quantities of
electricity, requires specialist cooling systems, and had _vastly_ less
computing power than the microcontroller in your washing machine.
Was anybody actually there? Did any of you guys see this happen? What
was it like? And did mainframes really come in bright orange cases with
inch-square glowy buttons on the front that randomly twinkle?
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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