Mama's Hall of Shame
Other
women buy hats. Mama collects computers. The pride of my collection
is a 900-pound Honeywell tape drive. This Honeywell 7600 was built
sometime in the 1960s and was used at the University of Michigan
until 1996. Banks, government offices, and large newspaper
publishers used similar systems.
When you open the case it is interesting to note that all of the
circuit boards are hand soldered. There isn’t a single integrated
chip in the whole beast. This Honeywell is just the tape drive, not
the terminal or the computer. Today, a hard drive with the speed and
capacity of this half-ton drive can fit in your hand. In the 1960s,
a mainframe like the Honeywell system cost well over $1,000,000
dollars. Now, I can get all of that mainframe’s functions in a
colorful operating system for about $1,500. What a revolution!
Mama’s Hall of Shame includes a sampling of each change in computer
architecture. There are mighty Macs and Trash 80s. I have grown up
with the computer world…and I love it. But wait, the best is yet to
come. <grin>
