When 1,000 words were enough

January 1, 2007 6:36 PM

Interviews with some early computer people at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
posted by bigbigdog (5 comments total)

Meaty. Mmm. Thank you.

Feel free to include the "nerdporn" tag if you wish. ;)
posted by loquacious at 7:01 PM on January 1, 2007

I also like this story (from here):

About 1957 a programmer at Livermore came up with the following clever scheme. I can’t imagine how he thought of this simple trick. He divided the mesh into 3 equal parts. Parts 1 and 2 were recorded on reel A which was then rewound. Part 3 was recorded on reel B which was not rewound. The calculation now commenced reading part 1 from reel A and writing onto the end of reel B. When part 1 of the array had been processed reel B was rewound and writing was switched to reel C. Part 2 of the mesh was read from reel A and written to reel C. When this was done reel B had finished rewinding and was ready to supply part 3, which was read and output went to reel C. When part 3 was finished reel C was rewound. At this point the next time step of the simulation was complete and part 1 was on the end of reel B, which had finished rewinding, while parts 2 and 3 were on reel C, which was rewinding. We now begin the next complete sweep of the mesh by reading part 1 from reel B and writing on reel A, when part 1 is done we rewind reel B and continue reading part 2 from reel C which has just finished rewinding. Part 2 is also written to reel A. When part 2 is done we rewind reel A and write part 3 to reel B. This is where we came in. We have overlapped tape rewind with the rest of the tasks with only three tape drives and reels.

posted by bigbigdog at 7:09 PM on January 1, 2007

*throws the text into a txt file, drags that to a 2GB SD card the size of a small stamp, shoves the SD card into a tiny media player barely bigger than a Zippo, all of which cost less than a fine steak dinner for one or two*


*watches the heads of a dozen oldschool computer scientists explode while they were muttering "Two billion words!? Three billion!? Five hundred billion? A trillion? What in the hell do you need a billion words for? 1000 words should be enough for anyone."*
posted by loquacious at 7:32 PM on January 1, 2007

Sounds like the genesis of Frippertronics. ... Parts 1 and 2 were recorded on reel A which was then rewound. Part 3 was recorded on reel B which was not rewound. The calculation now commenced reading part 1 from reel A and writing onto the end of reel B. When part 1 of the array had been processed reel B was rewound and writing was switched to reel C. Part 2 of the mesh was read from reel A and written to reel C. When this was done reel B had finished
posted by Gungho at 8:34 PM on January 1, 2007

Awesome stuff, thanks.
posted by equalpants at 9:41 PM on January 1, 2007