Does Anyone Know The Story Behind This Giant Computer?

Megalith

Megalith

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Motherboard has gotten its hands on another historic tech photograph, but no one seems to know anything about it beyond what the caption tells us: "Two Italian engineers watching a big electronic calculator placed into the control room of a textile industry. Italy, 1960s." I just think it’s a cool photo, and that’s good enough for me.

…sometimes the photos on these wire services are so old that the details are nonexistent. Case in point: Above, this wonderful, amazing photo of a gigantic calculator inside a control room at a textile factory. It’s so huge that it doesn’t look real—like they would’ve been better off with an abacus instead. It looks like a science fiction version of computers pulled directly out of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. It’s sitting in the Getty Images archive as an editorial photo, so it happened. But this house-size calculator—if that's even what it is—doesn’t appear to exist out the confines of this photo.
 
Looks like the small alcoves are for easy replacing vacuum tubes. No? It also appears to be for tracking the status of the factory equipment.
 
Probably an early SCADA system like this one from the '70s:
control_room.jpg


http://www.buhrer.ca/2013/07/scada-critical-infra-structure.html
 
Yeah... the stuff on the upper part of the walls look like it's for monitoring/setting power to various things inside the plant. The square boxes with the circles in them look like they're for synchronizing electrical phases (like when you are bringing a generator online for a plant). I can't see the other stuff well enough to guess at what it's for, and I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't figure it out even if I could see it better.
 
The upper wall section reminds me of a labview diagram. This is no calculator. It looks to be an industrial control system. In something like this, there would be less computation and more control engineering. Think SCADA.
 
This looks like a prop from an old James bond film :) The evil bosses control center in the mountain side lair, about to launch the satellites.
 
Crixus said:
The upper wall section reminds me of a labview diagram. This is no calculator. It looks to be an industrial control system. In something like this, there would be less computation and more control engineering. Think SCADA.
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I doubt many people will know what SCADA means.

"SCADA stands for supervisory control and data acquisition. In simple terms it refers to a computer system for analyzing and gathering data in real time."
 
This is not a computer. It's an old analog control panel built specifically for this plant. All the field instruments land here with analog indicators and discreet lamps on the process flow diagram up top. Might be some in the back but I don't see any switches or buttons. Probably monitors the entire process and they make adjustments locally at the equipment.
 
That is someone's idea of joke. You can see the top is wire trace which makes sense for 1960 level computer one level but the wall is forced perspective. Meaning it is totally fake. The corners of the wall fake. They used sheet metal with sharp edges up until the later nineties. The idea being they needed to un screw the bolts holding the panels on until much later when they painted over them with spackleing (can't remember how to spell that word the white stuff you cover nails with on sheet rock) in the nineties. They used industrail leaded paint to cut down on IR insulation but not in any of the control rooms until much later. Early on they had to pull open the panels to get at rodents and insects nesting in the walls and causing wires to be pulled out of sockets or chewed on wires. If you look up the original compure bug you can see what the old computers looked like. They ran off switchboards that were operated by a person unplugging a wire from one socket to another, the same ones as the old telco switch boards.
 
I doubt that thing even really gathers data other than just having feedback from few sensors that can shut things down much like paper jam sensors in a copier.

Then again, I don't know what those little rectangular and circular things are at operator height. Maybe they are printers or those old time ticker tape machines? Maybe it does have a number of computer circuits.

Edit: You can actually follow the logic on the nearer portions of the photo. You can see how there are two circuits that send output to the next stage within both the top half and the bottom half and that the second part of the circuit has a separate input from the first. Pretty neat stuff.
 
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drakken said:
That is someone's idea of joke. You can see the top is wire trace which makes sense for 1960 level computer one level but the wall is forced perspective. Meaning it is totally fake. The corners of the wall fake. They used sheet metal with sharp edges up until the later nineties. The idea being they needed to un screw the bolts holding the panels on until much later when they painted over them with spackleing (can't remember how to spell that word the white stuff you cover nails with on sheet rock) in the nineties. They used industrail leaded paint to cut down on IR insulation but not in any of the control rooms until much later. Early on they had to pull open the panels to get at rodents and insects nesting in the walls and causing wires to be pulled out of sockets or chewed on wires. If you look up the original compure bug you can see what the old computers looked like. They ran off switchboards that were operated by a person unplugging a wire from one socket to another, the same ones as the old telco switch boards.
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The old HVAC (Heating and Cooling) system from the 1950s where I work was entirely pneumatically controlled and all the logic and gauges were mounted to a big piece of plywood. Besides, these circuits look too well thought out to be something faked.
 
It's not fake. The square and round things are analog indicators for flow, pressure, level, temperature, and power. There's nothing unusual here for this period of time.
 
Burticus said:
I bet that monster doesn't overclock for shit.
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If you look closely, the orange and green dashed line appears to be the clock line. Just swap out the clock generators (which I think are the dark green funnel shapes) and see what happens! I wouldn't be surprised if they have a ton of headroom - like my 25MHz 486 that could overclock to 50MHz.
 
Obviously they are trying to figure out the right code to derive 5318008 and also have it print upside down.
 
WetMacula said:
This is not a computer. It's an old analog control panel built specifically for this plant. All the field instruments land here with analog indicators and discreet lamps on the process flow diagram up top. Might be some in the back but I don't see any switches or buttons. Probably monitors the entire process and they make adjustments locally at the equipment.
Click to expand...

I agree; this could be from the as early as 30's, even.

The only differences were the technologies used.

This looks earlier than what America did in WWII, which was vacuum tube based electronics.

This looks like pneumatics, relays, switches, indicator lights, etc.

The Zimmer company made the chart recorders, maybe even the whole console set; see the sign?
 
If this is a real working computer, why is there so much empty floor space? I'm inclined to say this is part of a film set.
 
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