World’s Fastest Computer 50 years Ago

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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Friday marked the 50th anniversary of switching on the Ferranti Atlas ‘supercomputer’. The computer was built and maintained in the United Kingdom and would be considered extremely archaic and slow by today’s standards, but its creation put the industry on a steady march into modern era mainframes and ultimately to the computers you are using today. Programming that beast was not only and art and science, but physically demanding as well. :eek:
 
maybe physical input should be artificially made as demanding today so we'd have healthier programmers...
 
Yet a single smart phone today probably has more computing power than all the computers on the planet combined back then.
 
maboblivion said:
maybe physical input should be artificially made as demanding today so we'd have healthier programmers...
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Wouldn't be enough. Besides, anyone actually interested in being healthy just needs to put 'some' effort into a decent diet and spend 15min a day working out. Or they could just take the stairs. Do pushups/situps between matches/commercials/compiling. Plenty of easy and simple ways to fit exercise into ones day. Most people just rack disciprine.
 
How does it run Crysis?

That bad boy could do 200 multiplications per second and almost 600 additions per second. 96KB of core and 576KB of drum memory is nothing to sneeze at. Magnetic. Tape. Compatible. 'nuff said.
 
I can really appreciate this.
I remember seeing simple (by today's standards) circuit boards and working on them about 15-20 years ago, and those would have been ultra advanced compared to the Atlas. :eek:

I just had a 14-hour workday the other day doing some server upgrades, and I felt pretty good about myself... but not after seeing these guys and their 26-hour long work day!!! Holy crap!
 
My favorite quote from the article:
"When we had finished commissioning, we eventually got to a point where the machine would run for ten minutes without fail, and at that point we all cheered and went to the pub to celebrate surviving ten minutes," Crowther explains.
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pxc said:
How does it run Crysis?

That bad boy could do 200 multiplications per second and almost 600 additions per second. 96KB of core and 576KB of drum memory is nothing to sneeze at. Magnetic. Tape. Compatible. 'nuff said.
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If you got those numbers from the same wikipedia entry I saw I think you're off by an SI unit:
Fixed-point register add – 1.59 microseconds
Floating-point add, no modification – 1.61 microseconds
Floating-point add, double modify – 2.61 microseconds
Floating-point multiply, double modify – 4.97 microseconds
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Would be ~600,000 integer adds and ~200,000 multiplication FLOPS. If the Geekbench floating point score is measured in MFLOPS then my phone has 10000x the performance of this supercomputer. So yeah you use more computing power to play angry birds while you take a dump than existed in the world in 1962.
 
-Dragon- said:
If you got those numbers from the same wikipedia entry I saw I think you're off by an SI unit:

Would be ~600,000 integer adds and ~200,000 multiplication FLOPS. If the Geekbench floating point score is measured in MFLOPS then my phone has 10000x the performance of this supercomputer. So yeah you use more computing power to play angry birds while you take a dump than existed in the world in 1962.
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My gameboy pocket has more processing power in it from 1993 than this supercomputer had.
It's actually quite amazing to see how far we've come in this type of technology.

This is the way people will be looking back at the Cray Titan from 2012 in 2062. :D
 
Red Falcon said:
This is the way people will be looking back at the Cray Titan from 2012 in 2062. :D
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I think more likely it will be the time when we switch off silicon as our substrate into some new synthetic material. Will most likely be within the next 20 years.
 
-Dragon- said:
If you got those numbers from the same wikipedia entry I saw I think you're off by an SI unit:
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Oops, don't know why I was thinking of ms when I posted. Home computers didn't surpass it in fp math performance until the first higher speed 80386 processors were released (w/o 80387). That's not too bad.

My first portable, a Tandy Pocket Computer PC-8, had a 4-bit processor running at 250KHz (IIRC). It trembled before that first supercomputer. :p
 
Red Falcon said:
My gameboy pocket has more processing power in it from 1993 than this supercomputer had.
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Probably not. The GBP has a Z80-class 8-bit processor running a little over 4MHz. The graphics hardware is where the GB gets its oomph. A 4.2MHz Z80 is about 1.5x faster than the 1MHz 6510 in a Commodore 64. It was never an efficient or very fast processor, and would be killed by that 50 year old supercomputer in floating point math. Maybe the GBP CPU could run integer code faster. :p
 
pxc said:
Probably not. The GBP has a Z80-class 8-bit processor running a little over 4MHz. The graphics hardware is where the GB gets its oomph. A 4.2MHz Z80 is about 1.5x faster than the 1MHz 6510 in a Commodore 64. It was never an efficient or very fast processor, and would be killed by that 50 year old supercomputer in floating point math. Maybe the GBP CPU could run integer code faster. :p
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Good information to know, thanks for the info! :cool:
 
wow a computer with thousands of terminals connected to the main computer [...or 1000's of computers connected to the cloud]

Ha! Everything that's old is new again....!
 
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