While reading this blog in a wealth of fine colors on your 2 GHz computer with 1,000 Mb of memory and 300 Gigabyte hard disk you might wanna surf with your wireless optical mouse to the Computer History Museum.The site contains lots of information on the development of computers. There's an interesting timeline where you find descriptions and photographs of computers, from the first models, operating with enormous banks of relays, to the latest technology. But there's more! You can search by category, read about companies, computer components, languages, games and the development of network communication.
There's an on-line exhibition tour that covers the history of the groundbreaking PDP-1 and the museum’s recent restoration of a PDP-1 to working order. In the visible storage you find a wealth of photographs. Another great site is old-computers.com. This site has an enormous archive with nearly all computers, including their technical details.
You can browse through the archive by name, year or company. There's a nice history section, describing in detail the development of computers. Surfing through these pages I can't help feeling a bit nostalgic. Writing software for over 25 years myself, I remember the days of hex code programming, simple compilers and the art of squeezing programs into a 64 Kilobyte memory. It's been a quantum leap from the first computers to your high-tech laptop. But one thing never changed: it's all about 0 and 1.
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As a 98G3LRU around 1970-71 on Teufelsberg, I was assigned to a project aimed at computer automation of collection, translation/analysis, and distribution of intel. That being over half a century ago, my recall is certainly not complete, not may it be totally accurate in spots. But here goes....
The project was located one floor below the comm center, a structure separate from the main collection facility. The rooms were not particularly large, but they were very cold....
We used 2 CDC-3150 computers, multi-platter disc drives (don't recall maker or specs, though they were called "High hats"), special reel-less tape drives for scanning/transcribing, and Beehive monitors to input results. I can't recall the exact user interface, other than it was not like current icon based methods.
To control material contamination (dust, etc), each morning the CDC on-site 24x7x365 technicians would fill the computer racks with polystyrene pellets. Next, they rubbed rubber nightstick like wands with silk to charge them. Those were used to remove the pellets.
From the terminals one could get a list of what had been collected on the tapes according to seeking rotas. I can't remember how that was presented on screen or whether there were priority indications. Nor do I remember the process for forwarding results.
At one point, we noticed an increase in the number of East German diplomatic Mercedes Benz sedans with special antennae driving around in the Grunewald forest. After investigation, we realized our Beehive terminals and other devices were radiating beyond the comm center structure - And that's what those vehicles were collecting. We shut down for a week or two while shielding was installed.
I do remember thinking success of the project when coupled with satellites launched in 1958 would likely lead to closing many, if not most or all, of the field stations as we knew them at the time.
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