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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>

 

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