Do you remember how computer centers looked like back in 1980-90s? Let us remind you.
These devices were used to read information from magtapes.
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A workplace for typing information
A place for a boss, we suppose …
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25 Responses to “Computer Center of 1980-90s”
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WOW how far we came since those days!
yep! ^^
Wow!!! I’d LOVE to go throught there personally. On an unrelated note: DON’T THROW ANY OF THAT AWAY! YOU CAN GET QUITE A LOT FOR EXOTIC VINTAGE COMPUTERS ON EBAY AND SUCH!
Yeah, I would LOVE to have some of that stuff!! Most of it belongs in a museum now. And I bet, some of those keyboards are exactly what I’m looking for too, but I couldn’t afford the shipping. DANG!!
They’re not throwing it away. They’re installing it.
lol good one!!! hahahaha
on the other note:
this is great!!!
Sometimes these older pieces have quite a bit of gold onboard, worth taking a look.
That’s more like 70’s or early 80’s than 80’s and 90’s.
Around the time one had to be a trained professional with a double degree even to get close of those things.
What I think about when I see old computer equipment like this is that when this stuff was introduced the people that used it were BLOWN AWAY! “Today we got new disk drives and they are only 8 inches and they store 32meg of data! WOW!”
Stores far less than that. 128 bytes on 72 tracks I think… I had a sealed set of 10 8 inch disks prior to moving.
WHERE? where is this? it’s awesome i would love to see this in person.
Each of those 56kg drives holds 5gb and cost $5000 !
1 TB driver would weight 11200 KG 11.2 Tons. Thats wicked
Made by Hatachi ltd of Japan circa 1970s .
Amazing and to think how far we have come since then. A computer that size must weigh a ton. Now we have them that fit into the palm of a hand. Incredible how far science has come since then…makes you wonder where we will be in another 10 or 15 years. Thanks for the upload…
They called it ‘hardware’ because it was made out of steel.
There’s a place in Romania where someone is really working hard to restore such ancient computers. That place is called “the Petroleum and Gas University” in the city of Ploiesti, southern Romania. If someone is interested, they have a young crazy PhD assistant in automatic and electronic systems who knows how to wire 8″ floppy drives and tape drives to get them work on a standard PC. If anyone wishes to jumpstart such a monster, just get a browser, open google, find that university and mail them. That guy is really crazy but he’s also a god. He built his own MP3/XviD player using such a magnetic tape drive. It’s so cool to watch those tapes while watching old fashion Sci-Fi movies. And audio goes through vacuum tubes. With enough vodka he can put that whole system in your picture back to work again.
where is that place anyway?
Not only a lot of gold in those, but the old HDD plates (about 15″, each held 2MB, a ten-pack cost $70,000) were aluminum with a copper coating. I took apart a bunch of them, and a 12″ (300mm) stack was about 110# (50 Kg) of nice clean aluminum. They were kept apart by aluminum spacer rings.
I sold a 8″ floppy drive case, room for three drives, two installed. It was about 10mm thick steel, and weighed 63# (29 Kg).
looks like scsi drives.
Such ancient technology. My god, it’s got to be like 25-30 years old.
About the hard drives. My “source” says the hard drives have the capacity of 2, maybe 3 GBytes. Interface is SCSI, speed is around 800 KBytes/s, maximum 1 MBytes/s. To get more speed, the manufacturers applied an old technique which is still largely in use today – twisted pairs. Each data wire is twisted around a negative wire so there would be no interference between data cables, this widely reducing transfer errors and of course, retry commands based on parity checking. Those two engines are for spinning the tapes. Harddrives have their own stepper motors with 15000 rpm. As big as they are, they are also incredible silent. The floppy drives are 1.6 MBytes Tandon TM848, which are compatible with 1.2MBytes 5.25″ – yes, you can connect them to a standard PC with a little help from “pinouts.ru” – and PC recognises them as valid 1.2MByte disk drives.
The tape drives also work on SCSI – only by watching the wires in the pictures, my guy says it seems there’s no old precursor of SCSI (pertec) interface.
The main central processing unit is not present in the pictures. It must be as big as the tape storage drives and also very interesting to see.
That computer should be some kind of a PDP family (PDP12?), one of the fastest computing system of its generation. Performance compared with an 80386 for computation speed… unfortunately no DMA channels available, at least no details of that from the circuit boards in the pictures.
I believe there’s something wrong with the web site, as comment still does not appear although it was posted last week (with no spam/obscene stuff included). I will write it again, maybe someone will be interested in restoring such old technical wonders. There’s a place in this world where someone is really working hard to restore such ancient computers. That place is called the petroleum and gas university in the city of ploiesti, southern romania. If someone is interested, they have a young crazy PhD assistant in automatic and electronic systems who knows how to wire 8″ floppy drives and tape drives to get them work on a standard PC. If anyone wishes to jumpstart such a monster, just get a browser, open gogle, find that university and mail them. As crazy as he is, you can say he’s a god. He built his own multimedia player using such a magnetic tape drive. It’s so cool to watch those tapes while watching old fashion Sci-Fi movies. data stream flows from the tape drive through a SCSI interface via the “tar” of “dd” application of some Unix operating system and the result feeds the input of the “mplayer” application. The audio goes through vacuum tubes. With enough vodka he can put that whole system in your picture back to work again.
where is that place anyway?
About those 2… 3 GBytes hard drives and all that amazing hardware – if anyone is in need of assistance, here’s how you find my guy – petroleum and gas university. There is a project for restoring an ancient PDP clone with both soviet and european microchips inside. anyone interested should search on internet and write to them with all details. help will come for sure.
…there’s really something wrong here, some very very useful information is missing, it is posted but is not listed. is it because no one is supposed to know how to jumpstart those old monsters?