[Leica] Old computer story

[jhnichols at lighttube.net (Jim Nichols)]

Interesting, Larry.  We had a lot of Nixie displays in early wind tunnel 
control rooms.  I ran across a catalog a while back that offered kits 
for building your own Nixie clocks. :-)

Jim Nichols
Tullahoma, TN USA

On 12/13/2013 5:07 PM, lrzeitlin at aol.com wrote:
> Interesting old computer story. In this day of smart phones it's hard 
> to believe that computers were once as big as houses. As a young 
> college student I used to walk by a building on campus that emitted 
> sounds like a threshing machine. One day I wandered in and found that 
> it was the home of the Aiken Mark 1 computer, a 30 foot long electro 
> mechanical device that was like a Frieden Calculating machine on 
> steroids. The noise was the sound of thousands of relays opening and 
> closing. It took 3 seconds to add a pair of numbers, about 16 seconds 
> to divide them. Dr. Aiken started work on it before WW2 and it 
> continued in operation well into the Korean war cranking out data for 
> the military. I was shown around the lab by An Wang, a graduate 
> student, who later invented the core memory and founded Wang 
> computing. In fact the first computer I ever bought for myself was a 
> Wang 700 that required programming in assembly language, displayed the 
> results on Nixie tubes and stored programs on audio cassette 
> cartridges. High tech indeed.
>
> Larry Z
>
>
>
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