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Perspectives on the History of Computing
Published in José López Soriano, Maximizing Benefits from IT Project Management, 2016
The most successful computer in this first-generation era was the IBM 650, of which several hundred were produced and sold. This computer introduced a memory schema that incorporated a secondary memory and a magnetic drum as a means to advance the concept of permanent storage. This schema was the predecessor of storage disks. The IBM 650 existed alongside other machines from different manufacturers, who were true pioneers of the early computer industry, including the UNIVAC 80, the UNIVAC 90, the IBM 704, the IBM 709, the Burroughs 220, and the UNIVAC 1105.
Introduction to computer architecture
Published in Joseph D. Dumas, Computer Architecture, 2016
Despite technological advances, second-generation machines were still very bulky and expensive, often taking up an entire large room and costing millions of dollars. The relatively small IBM 650, for example, weighed about a ton (not counting its 3000-pound power supply) and cost $500,000 in 1954. Of course, that would be several millions of today’s dollars! Core memory cost on the order of a dollar per byte, so the memory system alone for a large computer could have a cost in the seven-figure range.
Biographical Histories of Chemistry
Published in Ambix, 2022
Born in Algiers in 1938 to Hungarian parents, the versatile French chemist Pierre Laszlo is principally known for his work on organometallic chemistry and the catalysis of organic reactions, but he has also written on a wealth of other subjects, some strictly scientific and others of a more general nature. Although not a Nobel laureate, his recent autobiography is a welcome contribution to the genre for several reasons. One of them is, perhaps paradoxically, that he, although well-known to the scientific and cultural public, is not a chemist of the celebrated Nobel calibre. This makes his life and career more representative of the post-war chemical community, and his autobiography an interesting testimony of the chemical revolution in the second half of the twentieth century. The electronic computer made its entry into chemistry in the 1960s and Laszlo writes vividly about his first use of the bulky IBM 650 machine. Of more interest to the historian, he describes from his own experience the marked differences between the French and American research systems. The first, he says, is characterised by cronyism and the power of local “mandarins,” and he compares it unfavourably to the more progressive, meritocratic, and competitive American style of doing chemical research.
Fifty years in home computing, the digital computer and its private use(er)s
Published in International Journal of Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems, 2020
The private use of computers did not start when people were able to buy digital computers in stores. Its origins can be found in the ‘misuse’ of such technology for private purposes by their users. Here the primal scene of hacking in the 1950s at MIT (Boston) [1, p.1–26] or the use of an IBM 650 at Stanford University by students who calculated pairings with students and nurses (from a nearby nurses’ dormitory) in the computer centre at night [4, p.274ff.] could be mentioned. Above this, the tradition of ‘calculating toys’ should be mentioned since these toys are an important predecessor of computers, too: the marble computer for kids, constructions kits, board games and toys with calculating and computing capabilities as the ‘Dr. NIM’ and ‘Digi-Comp’ board games published in the 1960s by E.S.R. Inc (Figure 1).2