On 20-Nov-2012 16:21:20 Laurie Brown wrote:
On 20/11/2012 15:18, mick wrote:
On Tue, 20 Nov 2012 15:06:08 +0000 Laurie Brown laurie@brownowl.com allegedly wrote:
This is one for we old geeks. Reminds me of my first job as a Computer Operator on a Honeywell 120, back in 1973.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2235139/The-2-5ton-calculator -Rebooted-1951-definitely-wont-fit-pocket.html
Cheers, Laurie.
"The WITCH [...] had a multiplication time of between five and ten seconds. Modern day computers work in less than a second."
Classic piece of Mail reporting - technically illiterate.
Yeah, the standard of journalism is woeful sometimes, although strictly-speaking nano-seconds are indeed, "less than a second"!!!
Cheers, Laurie.
The BBC have done a much better job:
Two-tonne Witch computer gets a reboot http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20395212
When I saw the story, I wondered if this was the same machine that that I did work with, when I did a vacation job at Harwell during my third year studying Maths at Cambridge, in the Summer of 1959 (but when I look at the picture I don't think it was; also, that was a couple of years after 1957 when, it seems, the WITCH was dunked in Wolverhampton).
I had also done a vac job at Aldermaston (Summer 1957) which was my first contact with computing, but that was an IBM something or other. But that wouldn't have been the WITCH either.
Ted.
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