[PRCo] Burning Leaves--and Coal

[Edward Skuchas]

Bettis Atomic in West  Mifflin had CDC equipment in the 1970's. 6600  & 7600's.  Only the Lawrence Livermore lab had more powerful computers. We loaded stacks of cards for the nuclear reactor simulations we would run. On the 6600 the problem we were running would take about 3-5 hours to process about 1 second of simulation. We needed to simulate about 10-15 minutes, so you could see how long the computer would need to run. And they were the world's fastest computers at the time. 

Ed S

Sent from my iPhone

> On Oct 25, 2013, at 10:04 PM, Bob Rathke <bobrathke at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
> Most of us from the 1970's have these computer stories, Fred.  I used my first word processor in 1979 - a Digital computer the size of a small refrigerator with a 9" monochrome screen, plus a noisy daisy-wheel impact printer.  Hardly desktop, and no hard drive - the word processing program ran from an 8" floppy, and documents were stored on another 8" floppy. Those floppies had the massive capacity of 840KB each. That Digital computer cost $12,000, but it wasn't linked to anything, so in 1980 the company bought a modem to connect to another computer. That modem cost $750. 
>   
> Bob. 
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> 
> From: "Fred Schneider" <fwschneider at comcast.net> 
> To: "Western PA Trolley discussion" <pittsburgh-railways at mailman.dementix.org> 
> Sent: Friday, October 25, 2013 7:48:16 PM 
> Subject: Re: [PRCo] Burning Leaves--and Coal 
> 
> Bob, 
> 
> I can recall when the state had a mammoth computer room in the L&I Building in Harrisburg to handle all Employment Service data reporting and all the Unemployment Claims …. huge place on a raised floor to accommodate both the cabling and the air-conditing ducts to keep the main frame computers cool.   
> 
> Today I know what is sitting on my desk … each of them …. has far more power than what put the man on the moon back in the 1960s.   Probably the computers in most of our cars have more ooomph than that computer that put Armstrong on the moon. 
> 
> In the early 1980s, I was the head of an occupational information program in Pennsylvania to provide data to schools and anyone else who might need it … mostly for counseling kids.   The federal government wanted it all done on main frame computers.   In Pennsylvania, we were thinking about doing it on desk top computers and passing out the information on floppy disks or linking them by this new internet to desk tops in Harrisburg.   Washington told me that if we tried to do it that way, we would not be given any grant money.   Obviously someone who was making main frame computers had lobbied heavily to have things done his way.    Funny thing about that … two years later, my successor told me that I had been right and we're doing it your way.   
> 
> It's not your grandmother's Buick…. 
> 
> Fred 
> 
>> On Oct 25, 2013, at 7:14 PM, Bob Rathke wrote: 
>> 
>> I