Computer room walking tour, 1992

[@Epd3mik]

Hearing the Word "SSD" from a 1992 video makes it extremly cool!

[@ScienceReasonLove]

256 million 64 bit words is about 2 GB of storage which, thirty years on, you can get on an SD card for about a buck.

[@J.erem.y]

Now think about how this technology was used to build the baseline for climate science...

[@autohmae]

And they had a node in the predecessor of the Internet.

[@cdoublejj]

i nearly shouted out "jesus christ" that's some serious computing power, like the commercial building sized CAT dozers, thats is wickedly heavy iron and serious performance

[@1sonyzz]

flash storage existed in late 80's it was just very expensive and not for consumer market

[@devinharris9284]

So, an SSD with a capacity of roughly 2 Gigabytes and a performance of 16GFLOPS (double-precision). Pretty impressive for 1988!

[@lucasrem]

SanDisk, pre flash SSD

[@cdoublejj]

i nearly shouted out "jesus christ" that's some serious computing power, like the commercial building sized CAT dozers, thats is wickedly heavy iron and serious performance

[@TheAnxiousOwl]

I wonder how much that would be for the average customer back then (if it were even sold at the time to consumers)

[@scottschoppert9149]

No consumer would ever use anything like that, this is a super computer. @@TheAnxiousOwl

[@Olgasys]

It is even more crazy. The "solid state" they talk about at that age is likely RAM based.

[@wesley00042]

NCAR's new supercomputer, named Derecho, was inaugurated last month. It's capable of 19.87 petaflops, nearly 20 million times more than the Cray.

[@johneygd]

Holy fucking shit,now that’s mind blowing,i find this already sooo impressive,however i heard that even today’s smartphones are more powerful then even supercomputers from 1997 ,wich i really really could hardly imagine. I can imagine that the iphone 15 is more powerful then the gray 1 supercomputer but not more powerful or even equel in performances then all those supercomputers combined together in that building,does it?

[@Digi20]

​@@johneygd it is always very hard to measure performance across different hard and software, but yeah, giving the quoted numbers it can be assumed that a modern high end smartphone is several hundred to even million times quicker (depending on what you want from it) than the CRAY Y-MP machine here in the video. just daily mundane tasks like capturing a 4k video and, in real time, putting a skin filter on top would be something completely unthinkable in 1992. on a sidenote, the raw CPU power of that CRAY wasn´t even so extremely out of this world (that only happened later when super computers started to use thousands of CPUs and GPUs in parallel), i am pretty sure a run of the mil home pc from 10 years later could outperform it. but those computers had (for the time) very wide and fast busses to get all the data in and out from all the attached disk and tape drives. thats something the home pc couldnt have done just a few years later.

[@JaapGinder]

@@johneygd The point is: not the capabilities of the machine only counts, also the software is neccessary. I don't see an iPhone calculate the weather of tomorrow.... no app will ever do that, I presume. Besides that, the amount of data needed.... But, you'll never know what tomorrow will bring us!

[@johneygd]

@@JaapGinderwell yeah that’s true,our smartphone wouldn’t calculate tomorrow’s weather or doing number cruching colorizing fotos,or removing objects out of fotos,or breaking music down back into it’s original stems etc,,, If that was the case our smartphones would,ve become bulky with batteries only lasting 15 minutes and it would get overheated because of all that number crunching,that’s the reason why many apps are connected to a supercomputer trough internet to save the iphone for doing all that dirty complex work,phew🤣

[@8BitNaptime]

Ah but is it as stylish?

[@geoffcrisp7225]

I was a large systems Customer Engineer working on most of this IBM or plug compatible hardware in computer rooms / very large data centres like this in the UK. Three terabytes of data was common on large banking systems in 1992. It looks complex and seems daunting, but I was fortunate to enter IT in 1964. Generally well trained before working on new products and overtime grew into maintaining these complex large systems over 45 years in computing. There is no substitute for experience. It was a great, well paid career often working when most people were asleep. I still miss it after being retired ten years.

[@smakfu1375]

Oddly enough, some of the specs were wrong in this video, as pertaining to performance. The first machine, the 8 processor Cray Y-MP 8d/864 was configured with 512MB of RAM and was capable of 2.16 GFLOPS sustained. The second 2 processor Cray Y-MP 2d/216 machine, with 128MB of RAM was capable of about 514 MFLOPS sustained. While the Cray machines were very cool, the oddly overlooked Thinking Machines CM-2a is easily the sexiest and most exotic of the three, and was capable of around 1.5 GFLOPS sustained, but only with a very carefully coded workload. Altogether, those three machines could muster around 4.16 GFLOPS sustained float64 throughput. The desktop machine I'm writing this on (16 core Ryzen 9 5950x + Nvidia RTX 3080) is capable of 1075 double precision (float64) GFLOPS (610 GFLOPS on the CPU + 465 GFLOPS on the GPU). Mind you, this is like for like double precision floating point, not single precision (of which my machine is capable of over 40 TFLOPS float32 on the GPU alone). Essentially, when it comes to float64 performance, my desktop (which is 2 1/2 years old now) is 258 times faster than all three of those multi-million dollar supercomputers combined! Hilariously, my main desktop in 1992 (which I still have) was an Amiga 3000 with a PDS installed 25MHz 68040 upgrade, giving the machine 3 MFLOPS of raw double precision power (or 358,000 times slower than my current desktop). Pretty crazy how far we've come in the last 31 years.

[@estevanmariani4361]

AGREED .. when the Thinking Machine CM2 shows up.. im like ..whaaaaaaaaaaa.

[@smakfu1375]

@NeverMind-pk4wz First, the Y-MP numbers, along with the modern desktop hardware mentioned (and my Amiga’s 040 FPU) are based on Linpack runs for throughput (not peak) and are roughly comparable benchmarks performing double precision arithmetic. This is not apples and oranges, like comparing MIPS between dissimilar instruction set architectures. Second, modern CPU cores have no problems with immediacy of either register -register or register-memory operations as they have huge physical register files (implemented via queues or reservation stations) that implement register renaming, along with huge tiered cache hierarchies, where even down into shared L3 territory the bandwidth is unfathomable in comparison to a Y-MP’s processor (especially when we’re talking things like core and die interconnects). There’s comparatively little impact from context switching, so much so that not only are modern CPU cores deeply pipelined, wide-superscalar machines, most implement speculative fetch and execute and, in many architectures, SMT to allow multiple simultaneous disparate instruction streams, by exposing two or more architectural front-ends (logical processors) to the operating system for simultaneous scheduling (thread contexts). I’m not even going to delve into the comparatively enormous transistor budgets afforded to SIMD vector (and other SIMD) logic on modern cores. And this is just on the CPU side - when comparing the true heir to specialized vector processors, we get into the MIMD world of GPUs, which offer compute throughput that makes anything we could have dreamt of in 1992 pale in comparison. Finally, when comparing modern CPU cores to the Y-MP’s CPU’s, they’re not actually radically different, nor is the Y-MP particularly exotic. Physical implementation was insane (out of necessity in that era), but logically it’s not impressive by today’s standards. You have scalar instructions, SIMD vector instructions, addressing instructions, along with corresponding architectural and physical registers, and corresponding execution units. In fact, while the Y-MP might have a more elegant ISA, and a far simpler instructions set compared to modern AMD64 and ARM64 (again, out of necessity), the Y-MP was a shared memory multiprocessor machine not at all dissimilar to todays modern chip-multiprocessors (multicore). So yeah you can roughly compare performance when talking about floating point operations, and yes, even basic hardware really is radically more powerful than 30 year old supercomputers.

[@nine7295]

I bought my Amiga 3000 back in 1991 and I still have it (unused now).

[@smakfu1375]

@@nine7295 Make sure you remove the Varta battery if you haven't already, or it might end up needing some serious repairs (if you haven't looked, you'd be shocked at the prices 3000's go for nowadays).

[@ALFAshizik]

👍👍👍👍👍👍🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝

[@Foxtrot_Foxtrot_Lima]

My Jellyfin server has 60TB, in 3 20TB HDDs. Its wild how much space (rooms) 26TB used to take up.

[@jbgaud]

But not 8000 processors

[@autohmae]

@@jbgaud and still far more computing power

[@wedgie502]

@@jbgaud funny you should say that. the Nvidia 4090 has 16384 CUDA Cores. You can count each core as an individual processor.

[@ruadeil_zabelin]

@@jbgaud It doesn't really need that. You can do these things now on a handfull of GPUs

[@mqsv]

Actually the rate of cost per GB has tapered off a bit. If storage prices/technologies has improved at the same rate as in the 1990s, we'd have...I just a rough guess, $1 petabyte drives by now. We still have warehouse sized computers to support our every-day technology (can you use your phone/laptop offline much? If not, every time you go online you're interacting with google, amazon, facebook, etc. with their massive data centers.

[@cwbh10]

Really reminds me of that old Retro Encabulator. The ones that's like "The original machine had a base plate of prefabulated amulite, surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two spurving bearings were in a direct line with the panametric fan"

[@hummel6364]

I hope they do a video like this for modern hardware at one point. Numbers will be absolutely nuts, but it has to be filmed on an old camera like this too.

[@redline1916]

Yeah, no. Unfortunately, most media input these days will either be in the form of barely any information at all on the subject and how the devices work, or they will be specifically designed to be overbearing with none of the same media styles used in the late 80s - early 2000s as these were. I'm afraid that golden era is well lost and over for us.

[@hummel6364]

@@redline1916 I'm not sure how this film was originally used but it seems to me like it's mostly just an advertisement to scientists who may actually have use for such massive amounts of computation and data storage. (Even today it's still somewhat impressive after all.)

[@MinifigNewsguy]

@@hummel6364this was shot on video tape…clearly not “filmed”!

[@marculix]

Imagine your Samsung S22 delivers nowadays 2500 GFLOPS compared to the 1 GFLOP of this CRAY supercomputer in 1992. We literally carry around pocket size supercomputers today. Mindblowing.

[@Kenny6253]

This is so impressive for the time! What a neat capsule into the past!

[@junieebeann]

I love that they read out the models of each device, freaking cool as hell

[@PCUSER486]

Wow this is awesome ♥️ . Fancy to see you here 🥂

[@markedwards4879]

I think that the scariest part of this video was that I have worked with/for or on most of the equipment in this video, and now I’m feeling very old lol. My laptop with a 4TB SSD and M1Pro processor also has more I/O capabilities than the machines shown here. So many names that we no longer see - Gandalf, Cray, Network Systems, Sun, StorageTek. IBM 3090s and 4480 carts. So many memories, now consigned to history.

[@Justincoe]

lol Apple

[@rabidbigdog]

Magical. In my career, I always wanted to go into weather/CFD modelling.

[@jwvdvuurst]

So cool! The time when 4 Gb was mind-boggling huge!

[@haramaschabrasir8662]

The industrial design of those machines is something else...

[@betaradish9968]

This hardware would have been the cutting edge of cutting edge at the time. Now my iPhone, that I am using to watch this while on the toilet, has more computing power. Amazing.

[@624radicalham]

But then why aren't Iphones used in data centers today? It's a consumer product. There is still a need to run massive equipment in computer rooms today

[@rty1955]

Not exactly sparky. How many users can your phone handle?? Now think of how many users these "old" machines handled

[@anisalikhan]

@@624radicalhamyou say that, but ARM based CPUs in data centers are going to be more and more common. I think ultimately a lot of legacy x86 code will be refactored or rewritten for ARM, the CPU architecture that mobile devices like iOS and Android devices use.

[@DAAI741]

​@@624radicalhamI think you misinterpreted his comment. He's Just commenting on how much computing has miniaturized

[@H33t3Speaks]

@@rty1955Facebook and Google have data centers under the ocean. Welcome to 2024.

[@Yarach]

Where is the turbo encabulator?

[@jakobole]

Hidden begind the panelectric fan. You know - to avoid side-fumbling.

[@grinderkenny]

Very cool video.. Just comparing then to now (2023) in just storage alone that took vast room (28TB), now fits in the palm of your hand in just two drives, That is an incredible amount of storage and to deal with some of it to place it on film or VHS tape. Mind blowing then and today.

[@marinoceccotti9155]

Awesome video. A bit saddening to think all these beauties may have been sent to the scrape-yard.

[@ASR_0610]

That the sad thing about innovation, computer hardware become outdated fast. Lucky moderns computer are designed to be upgraded with new hardware.

[@ruadeil_zabelin]

@@ASR_0610 not as much as you'd hope. I wouldn't be able to replace my cpu with a newer one since the socket changed. I wouldn't be able to just get an RTX4080 without first replacing the power supply, and that is assuming my motherboard doesn't cause some kind of issue with it. I wouldn't be able to slot in new faster ram since it is now DDR5 instead of the DDR4 from ~2 years ago. In other words.. for a proper upgrade, I still end up replacing the whole thing.

[@thetechdudemc]

There are a handful of museums out there with the aim of preserving these systems, and minicomputers like PDP-11's are a frequent exhibit at vintage computer festivals

[@mitchell.9632]

@@ruadeil_zabelin frame work laptop is upgrade-able to an extent.

[@gavin9038]

Crazy that the best way to output graphics was to load them onto an analog chemical cine film format. I've been fascinated by old computers for years but had no idea that's how fancy graphics of the timr might have been displayed.

[@HyenaEmpyema]

The digital video formats barely existed at the time. And since TV was analog, it makes sense they output analog to film and tape.

[@stringercorrales6627]

Call the receptionist and tell her to give me the film processor so I can develop kino c-41 pictures.

[@wjckc79]

I worked in a similar type of facility in 1997, except it was mostly IBM mainframes. Admittedly, it was out of date by then, but very hard to replace. It was always interesting to see a mainframe cracked open, revealing an OS\2 workstation inside. In my case, the storage was mostly tape (8-track). We had a library of over 800,000 and it was NOT automated. When a system called for a tape, you had to go find it and manually insert it. On a busy night it was quite a workout. Don't even get me started on backup night. This was a.... let's say secure facility. I had no idea what the computers were actually doing even when I had interface access through a console to complete tasks.

[@jovetj]

I was a mainframe operator for about 5 years, so I can relate. I am sure we did not have as many tape cartridges as you, but some days it sure felt like it. I actually remember what I was doing at 2000-01-01 T00:00:00... I was mounting a tape!

[@timmy7201]

I would argue that IBM has the longest track record, of being most "outdated" of all tech companies still in existence...

[@jovetj]

@@timmy7201 If that's true, then why do they file THE MOST patents each and every year? Of anyone!!

[@timmy7201]

@@jovetj Ever heard of patent trolling or patent hoarding? IBM doesn't use those patents, besides suing other companies for infringements. They just stifle research and innovation..

[@S7EVE_P]

1992 was the year I left college and started working in IT. At home I had just invested in my first ever hard drive, a 20mb unit (actually a hard-card) for my ibm compatible machine at the cost of around 1 weeks wages. Sat in my home office now I'm looking at a WD 4TB drive that cost less than 1 days wages and has 64mb cache memory thats more than that first drive had storage!!

[@raccoon681]

Don't forget the space on your micro sd card. The size of raisin yet vastly more storage then there massive 5.2 gigabyte units shown.

[@nine7295]

In 1991, I bought a 100MB SCSI quantum HDD to upgrade the 52MB HDD inside my Amiga 3000. I think I paid about $300 USD then, not exactly sure now. I still have that unit.

[@julienchanois9295]

What complexity! Incredible diversity of devices, computer technologies and architectures designed by top engineers. I'm a bit nostalgic of this era, thinking that a CFD datacender nowadays is simply made of farms of PCs with powerful Nvidia graphics cards.

[@jennamusgrove5603]

My wife loves pinball machines and was absolutely enthralled by this video. Thank you so much for making it.

[@loyalopposition-us]

Pretty funny. I was with a company installing an alarm system in a very large data center back in 1974. There was a note taped to one particularly menacing looking computer that read ...It would take 100 employees working 100 hours to correct all the mistakes this machine can make in 10 seconds, so for God's sake BE CAREFUL!

[@christerjohanzzon]

Wow, and now I have similar data capacity and computing power in my desktop computer. What a time to be alive.

[@MeppyMan]

23TB stored on 100,000 tape cartridges. Today you can get that on a single LTO tape that costs about $50!

[@JV-pu8kx]

The comparison I like to make: in the mid nineties an entire encyclopedia could be put on a single CD-ROM. That would be 650 MB of data. Today, a single micro-SD can hold _many_ times that! But, shrinking all those tape cartridges is an equally impressive leap in data storage technology. Even more impressive? Imagine a refrigerator-sized hard disk holding _one_ megabyte of data, compared to today.

[@rty1955]

Imagine if that tape went bad hahaha

[@Dr.W.Krueger]

@@rty1955 magnetic tape will definitely last longer than any mechanical / solid-state drive.

[@vylbird8014]

@@Dr.W.KruegerCaveat: Magnetic tape has a very long lifespan *if properly stored*. It can last decades. It is very sensitive to storage conditions though, and that life will be greatly shortened if it isn't kept at the ideal temperature and humidity.

[@rty1955]

@@Dr.W.Krueger this is true, but what happens when the drive chews the tape? Thats a LOT of data to lose

[@HyenaEmpyema]

Im curious about the end game for these machines. When was it pulled from service and what did they do with it? The machine probably cost millions and of course depreciated. But I'm curious about that time in between when it was decommissioned from the first owner but before it was sold for scrap.

[@digitalshackonthelane]

Most of these were flogged to the very last moment or until it was no longer economical to run them. (Output over power cost etc.) Also, these required a tremendous staff to run. By the end of the 90's, running these “big iron” pieces, without having such a staff was untenable. During that period also there was a serious economic downturn that started to spell the beginning of the end for these systems. Managers were demanding on an ever-increasing basis more and more but had less and less staff to which to do the same operations. Running “Big Iron” was labor intensive and without the staff, it hampered the overall performance of the systems. Additionally, from 1992 to 2002, the run on the Moorse law principle radically outstripped the pace at which these machines were able to be efficient in producing results. Their only saving grace was their redundant and parity checksum abilities, but even by the mid-2000s, small platforms were wildly outstripping these systems daily. So, in summary, many were literally run on their last day like a regular day, and at near the end of that shift, data was fully backed up, and a small effort to wipe was then committed, and the room went dark / powered down. Literally to some extent, the next day the scrap folks would show up and start to pull the equipment apart or out, and in some cases while data management folks were still boxing tapes for archive or transfer. I can attest to it. I watched it happen in a facility in Canada that I had only just been employed in. The era of big iron was to a degree forever changed with the wild rip of Moore’s Law in that time and the advancements that came from it.

[@HyenaEmpyema]

@@digitalshackonthelane thanks for such a detailed answer! I guess for a mainframe/super computer to be usable after decommissioning it would need to be built that way from the start.Whats amazing is that a lot of those backup tapes probably work still, since tape is rated for ~30 years.

[@sigmawarrior.fokeryou]

​@@HyenaEmpyemathe question is: what meaningful data would we recovery from the tapes?

[@stringercorrales6627]

@@sigmawarrior.fokeryouproof that climate change is not my fault.

[@galnetdor]

around the time of this video, I worked for one of the supercomputers centers run by NSF in Princeton NJ. While we had access to crays on the network, we mostly used CDCs and had one of the few ETA10g's which at the time was more powerful. (Specs are on wiki somewhere, but safe to say your cell phone can outperform it now) One day I had used telnet (ssh was not the thing yet) to edit some files on a Cray using emacs. There was such a clear improvement in behavior over the VAXstations and Sun 2s we using locally that I just kept editing the entire project that way. A few days later I got called on the carpet for using a huge chunk of budgeted cpu time for emacs. :-) These you just expect computers to keep up with you when typing, but in those days it was just expected to have to type slowly or wait for the computer to catch up.

[@sigmawarrior.fokeryou]

Tks for sharing your experience

[@railgap]

editing files directly on a Cray, huh?

[@molnaredmond]

Your time was clearly not as valuable as the Cray's.

[@lithgowlights859]

Wow we have come so far in 31 years, thanks for the view of the past

[@kasel1979krettnach]

Computers had style back then. All look like genuine Hollywood items. Also the disk retrieval machine reminds me of a robot from a movie.

[@IntelCoreI77700K]

They still use disk retrieval machines in many data centers today. Mainly for archival purposes

[@MN-Hillbilly]

​@@IntelCoreI77700KIn Panama in 1991 we had a tape retrieval machine in the Army. His name was Private Boone.

[@vinylcabasse]

love the random patterns on that thinking machines unit. i assume 8192 LEDs, one showing the status of each of the parallel processors

[@qdaniele97]

​​@@vinylcabasseOriginally they were designed to work exactly like that, but it would've meant that in a perfectly working machine the led panel would've remained unassumingly solid red most of the time (all CPUs working and none idle) and Thinking Machines designers, always remembering the importance of the "rule of cool", decided to change it to make them blink randomly like the computers in most scifi movies 😁 (I believe they kept the ability to switch it back to the "boring mode").

[@vinylcabasse]

@@qdaniele97 makes complete sense, and that's awesome, lol

[@code1017]

Impressive for the time. Looking at this now, this all looks ancient but to think that this video was in my lifetime 😳🤯

[@ZoruaZorroark]

30 years later, we have mobile devices that can do things far beyond what was imaginable to anyone at this time period

[@dillon1012]

Right now the average desktop is about as fast as a supercomputer from the mid to late nineties! (From Top500 1997, the fastest supercomputer was about 1 Tflop, with the average being around 20 Gflop)

[@miasmator]

They could do if the software wasn't utter crap..

[@bitterlemonboy]

Mine is as fast as 1998-2004 supercomputers. It's an uh, above average desktop.

[@BlownMacTruck]

Uh no. It wasn’t beyond pretty much anyone’s imagination. Tech moves at a rapid pace, and only idiots on KZbin who want upvotes post dumb comments that think otherwise. Or do you think 30 years from now we’ll have the exact same tech level and speed?

[@kasel1979krettnach]

ZZ's comment is default (and boring) under every computer history video. In the case above it is quite off as well, as many phones don't have Terabytes of storage ( I think, I don't know how much storage my iPhone has, nor do I know what model it is...) @@BlownMacTruck

[@ncc17701a]

Oh - that brings back memories! Mostly fond ones too. Two of us on shift one day worked out how to stack the tape cartridges across the tape drives we had to maximize throughput (so we had a tape already loaded as opposed to having to wait for a tape to unload/load). Nobody could understand how we managed to get work through so fast with just the two of us! As for ACS, I managed to argue against having them (robot arm was a single point of failure as it was also responsible for passing through tapes to another unit via the pass-thru port - and we needed at least 2 units). Went with IBM libraries instead (which had parallel tracked robot arms, so an arm failure didn't necessarily stop the library from working).

[@LogicalNiko]

Back when I was in the University of Illinois just 5 years later I spent a good amount of time ripping out the remnants of a lot of similar, but not as extensive, deployments like these. Pretty much everything except for the raised floors and CRAC units was obsolete.

[@remghoost]

I freaking love videos like this. It really gives a perspective on how amazing our tech is nowadays. That thing could do 1 billion FLOPS. My 7 year old graphics card can do 5 TRILLION FLOPS. In the size of a book, not an entire floor of a building. What an amazing time to be alive.

[@jimtaylor201]

It's amazing how impressive this stuff was back in its day, today I have more power, memory, and storage in the desktop machine next to me. What cost millions can be had today for under $2k

[@retrograde98xp7]

Old computers look so cool. That segmented black cube with red (I'm assuming CRT, though it could be plasma) is sucha striking image.

[@pigpenpete]

This video is great - I wish I was around to enjoy this era in person, sadly just a few years too late. So much variety in supercomputing back then.

[@douro20]

The Cray disks were apparently made by Ibis, a Silicon Valley company which at the beginning specialised in IBM plug-compatible disk storage, but later developed special dual-channel hard disks for supercomputers.

[@LarryRobinsonintothefog]

Remember the clack-clack-clack sound walking near one, knew it was elevated for the cables but didn't know it was probably anti-static.

[@semo8460]

3:22 Wow, that red cube with the red flashing lights looked like it would house the evil AI "Red Queen" from the 2002 film Resident Evil :D

[@errorsushi]

Thank you so much for this video! I love seeing more footage of the Connection Machine especially.

[@rustyshackleford1305]

For perspective, that next year my dad couldn't get DOOM to run on our computer because it was too crappy. We had literally bought it the same year this tape came out.

[@Shrek_Has_Covid19]

and today people would be surprised if you couldn't run it on a calculator

[@thecianinator]

0:40 YOOOOO A CONNECTION MACHINE

[@mastrtonberry2]

I have two 16tb, eight 18tb, and four 20tb drives just sitting here within a couple of square feet section of my desk. I'm comtemplating how much more of this hardware would be required to match that and it's blowing my mind.

[@MonospaceMentor]

That Connection Machine would still steal the thunder of any modern server farm. At least in terms of looking absolutely badass.

[@tybread2997]

All I really get from this is my desktop PC would be the size of a building in 1992. I do wonder what ended up happening to all this equipment.

[@theaustralianconundrum]

Scrap! VERY expensive equipment turned into VERY cheap scrap! None of these old systems were kept. 99% are now part of your car or the plumbing in your new home. LOL

[@MonsterMovieTV]

Picture of Cray in thumbnail, my geek flaired out of control. Excellent video.

[@marwi16a53]

SSD, Terabytes,… by the time, nobody would ever have thought about that being in private houses in a time not even that far away

[@MobCat_]

26TB of "cold storage" (all the stuff on those 100,000 tape carts in '92) is still a lot of data for people now days. It's only like 3 hdds now days. But still a lot of data.

[@madriditunes7021]

​​​@@MobCat_Nice video 🥰 but not for VR.... I have almost 20 Tera of VR videos in 8K 😂 more interesting in a size of shoe box 😂 it's like micro SD 16mb vs 512GB...Imagine what it will be like in 100 years.

[@dg-hughes]

I got a 1.2GB drive around 1995?? and thought I was living in the future but 24MB RAM (a lot for the time) and a 486DX2 66MHz CPU (Pentium 1 was out at the time).

[@0x1EGEN]

@@MobCat_ Not even 3. Western Digital's Ultrastar DC HC670 is a 26TB hard drive. Seagate and other brands are already working on releasing a 28-30TB HDDs.

[@BlownMacTruck]

Why does everyone post crap like this? Actually plenty of people thought that. Just because you’re too dumb to understand how time and tech work doesn’t mean everyone else is on that low level.

[@davidgrisez]

Super Computer systems have come a long way in the last 31 years since 1992. It would be interesting to know how many years this computer system was in service before it was finally shutdown and removed from service and replaced by a newer system.

[@anonymousplanetfambly4598]

...I so remember this. Such a trip back in time...glorious.

[@drd6416]

seeing the 3490s takes me back, this is when IT was pretty specialist as an operator, and data centres actually looked like youd spent money on serious power lol

[@The_Conspiracy_Analyst]

That computer to film system was VERY cool!

[@Dr.W.Krueger]

thank you for uploading. reminds me somewhat of how our render farm at mental images looked around 1990, including that battery room(that caught fire once). the climate control system made it unbearable to work for long in there, so the admins had their terminals in an adjacent room.

[@stringercorrales6627]

Can I have the film processor?

[@smb3d]

Oh man, I used Mental Ray for many years with Maya until around 2006-7 when we switched to VRay. Those were the days. Final Gather flicker was the bane of my existence.

[@GroovyVideo2]

Austin TX 1992 i was at a scrap yard - truck drives in - they dump the biggest hard drive I ever seen - disk was about 16 inches maybe bigger - enclosed in glass case - could see all the parts all super nice and $pendy - work of Art - to this day I wished I would have gotten it - was sad to see it laying in the dirt

[@johneygd]

Hearing the word terabyte in 1992 just absolutely blows my mind,i was already mind blown away once i heard about a 1terabyte harddisk drive back in 2015,but these days we already have 1terabyte usb sticks,heck even my 8 year old laptop ssd drive is not 1 terabye, In fact ssd drives were ridiculously expensive back in 2010 and didn’t had much storage then the cheaper but higher capacity harddisk drives,these days ssd drives seems to be sooo common and harddisk drives seems to become obsolete and outdated these days,right???

[@michaelr9627]

Yeah, more or less anyway. For the average consumer even an inexpensive SSD is the way to go when building or ordering a computer. The performance benefits coupled with ever improving pricing is thankfully creating an ecosystem of modern devices that aren't lobotomized by their mass storage. I still have plenty of spinning rust in use but most for my own storage and archival needs. Hard drives still have their place for mass storage however the days of being a valid boot drive are a bit behind us... thankfully!!! >.

[@miasmator]

Hard drives are still useful if you store lots of pirate movies and TV series. The price per TB is three times lower (five times if you need drives that are larger than 16 TB). Keep in mind that you will need SATA port multiplier capable motherboards and more drive backplanes with lower capacity drives.

[@oldtwinsna8347]

hard drives still needed for more reliable long-term backup purposes. ssd's need refresh electrical power so they cannot sit around indefinitely unplugged from the wall. hard drives, meanwhile, can in fact sit detached and perform flawlessly if they were in that state to begin with.

[@johneygd]

@@oldtwinsna8347 how long will it take for an ssd drive to devsy? I have heard that the newest ssd drives could hold data for 100 years,but i || take that with a grain of salt, In such case i may better off burning all that stuff on a rom chip in case am worried about my data or make multiple backups on usb sticks.

[@michaelr9627]

@@oldtwinsna8347 hard drives honestly should be used for cold storage either as they are still subject to bit rot unless you gave a managed storage pool scrubbing the data. At that point the disks are spinning 24/7 so it's important to by properly rated drives. Real archival storage would be something along the lines of a tape backup. Though a combination of different mediums can achieve the goal of proper data retention and speed of access.

[@clangerbasher]

Takes me back to a previous life where I managed a robotic tape library.

[@datasilouk1995]

Very, very interesting. Thank you for uploading.

[@richardgregory3684]

How times have movedl my distinctly middle of the road graphics card that's now over 6 years old contains many times the processing power - in something the size of a paperback book

[@turboslag]

Please forgive the following little vintage computer anecdote, I know very little about computers, especially at this level but I love to watch material on cutting edge computing from the past. In our family business back in the 80's we had a network system based on what was then cutting edge for small users, a 286 file server, wow! It had custom written business software because, for that time, we had quite a difficult application. So, the system had been installed for about 8 months and one afternoon the guy from the supplying company who did routine software maintenance as part of the service contract, called me to advise that he needed our authorization to install a larger hard drive as we had almost filled the original. It was going to be quite expensive as it needed to be double the size, from 10MB to an incredible 20MB!! Makes me smile now to think of how significant that was then to what almost everyone has at their fingertips now! I still have the file server, must have a chip count in the hundreds, but it still works! And one last thing about that system, it was £12,000 in 1988, for an 8 user system!!

[@debconfsetup8673]

did they still use film photoprinter for visualization in 90th? isnt't VCR wolud be cheaper?

[@stringercorrales6627]

Not enough Tektronix vector displays.

[@joejurneke9576]

I worked on the automated library system.

[@video99couk]

08:53 I would have expected BetacamSP rather than a U-matic VO9850 and a collection of VHS machines. Maybe that's what they got to later.

[@lutello3012]

Oh he said Umatic SP. I was half expecting an early HD tape format too.

[@VideoArchiveGuy]

@@lutello3012 It was driven by customer demand, so even if they had had an early HD deck, customers likely would not have.

[@CraigLuna]

Went to the Livermore supercomputer center just 5 years later showed how quickly things changed though.

[@Stephen.Bingham]

The IBM PC-AT on a desk (7m44s) did not warrant a mention… Who would have imagined at this point that it would take over high performance computing?

[@Albrecht8000]

3:00 Today (2023) just one hard disk. 😄 3:46 Reminds me at the compute from "Jurassic Park"!

[@Muonium1]

The only thing that exceeds our reliably hubristic exuberance about the incredible scale of newly available computational power is our retrospective embarrassment at our own previous excitement over what now can literally fit in a matchbox just few short decades later!

[@CreachterZ]

Even had built in seating!

[@MikesFutureRetro]

How many iPhones does this system equal ? Heating storage in gigabytes as a big number is humbling.. I was expecting Tera or petsbyte storage

[@AluminumOxide]

Hard to believe that today's high end smartphones can perfom the same number of calculations per second as this PC behemoth in 1992!

[@ruperterskin2117]

Cool. Thanks for sharing.

[@maxdsgal]

😢alguien sabe que procesaba ahí la unam o el itesem además del conacyt???

[@CiscoWes]

I always wondered if you could sit on those two benches that is on a Cray or if it wasn't made to sit on.

[@vylbird8014]

You can. The bench is primarily functional volume - it houses the power and cooling system. But it is made strong enough to sit on easily, and even has a comfortable padded surface: It is designed to serve as a bench as a secondary function. I assume because it added no significant cost to put some padding on the top.

[@jonathankleinow2073]

@@vylbird8014 For an example of such a use, see the 1992 film Sneakers. The characters played by Robert Redford and Ben Kingsley sit on a Cray Y-MP.

[@mm-hl7gh]

what happened to all these systems ? what does such an institute do when the machines get decomissioned ?

[@WhitfieldProductionsTV]

wish they would give us details about "mhz/ghz" "physical ram" for laymen people.

[@samwalker7567]

Honestly? The MHz value isn't actually that useful here. We're talking about a whole bunch of machines built with specialised hardware and a variety of CPU architectures, most of which were not consumer-type Intel chips so comparison on clock speed alone is not possible. You also have the RISC vs CISC situation where a RISC CPU will always clock far higher than an equivalently capable CISC CPU. Trying to compare them based upon what MHz the system runs at is comparing apples to oranges. The measure they do give, FLOPS, is far more CPU-agnostic as it measures a common benchmark - how much math per second a CPU can do. In fact, the idea that MHz was somehow intrinsically linked to performance is basically an Intel marketing gimmick, their CPUs clocked higher speeds than their competitors and so they pushed for the "more MHz = faster" idea to sell more products. For what it's worth, a top end 2023 CPU can have a lower clock speed than a 2003 Pentium 4, but it's orders of magnitude more powerful, even running on a single core. Basically, the layman value SHOULD be FLOPS or even a jargon free "calculations per second" but a bunch of marketing guys screwed that up for everyone.

[@WhitfieldProductionsTV]

@@samwalker7567 I would just like to know how fast the machines were in a standard we use for consumer market today, it would help myself and others to understand, these jargens they use, I have zero idea what they mean in terms of speed.

[@bdhaliwal24]

I wonder if my computer can render to a 16mm film reel?

[@rfwm]

But can it run Doom?

[@kxmode]

That computer is fast! It's CRAY-CRAY!

[@bunnythekid]

I wonder if they used RAM and a backup battery for the SSD

[@macjonte]

And just 22 years later this was a normal spec for a phone in millions of pockets. Crazy.

[@colclumper]

ooof one of my NVME's stores that data in a fraction of the time.I can't wait to see what in is store in the next 20 years

[@Thrakus]

Why is little to nothing put into the style and look of mainframes today?

[@peterbarber716]

I remember being wowed by another documentary about weather forecasting featuring this computer when I was at school. “One billion floating-point operations per second!” For only £10,000,000 or so. Wow! So to obtain the same raw speed as the GPU in an Apple Studio with an M2 Ultra… …which you can buy in a couple of minutes online for £5200… …and have delivered to your door by a standard parcels delivery company. Tomorrow… …you would just need to spend… …the GDP of Portugal or so. 😮 (faints)

[@derekdowns6275]

I've gone from working with an IBM System 3 to wondering if I should save this video on my spare 1 TB SSD. Wild...

[@mikip3242]

I was hoping for this to be an analog horror masterpiece. Instead I got educated

[@choppergirl]

It ran fast... but only if you were running a multithreaded Fortran program. Apple found this out the hard way when they bought a purple Cray to design computers and it turned out kind of useless for them. The SGI workstations they had connected to it were faster.

[@jonlaban4272]

Wonderful history

[@maxwillson]

It's funny how it took an entire hallway to have 25TB, I most likely have 25TB in my bedroom LOL

[@ethaneveraldo]

The most interesting part was the robotic hard drive swapper, which I think is still impressive even for today.

[@supercompooper]

Omg a Thinking Machine! I used those! Inmos CPU's!

[@tokyowarfare6729]

the black one around d 3:50 has the looks.

[@allezvenga7617]

Thanks for your sharing

[@christopherjackson2157]

This all begs the question... how do I run climate models on my/toaster How are modern systems so much more powerful and yet struggle to run so much more mundane tasks

[@kilemeinocalvire9898]

data sets are required not to mention most programs/programmers only interface with an OS and not with direct hardware

[@oldtwinsna8347]

Languages have become far more high level so applications can be deployed quickly and can scale easily. Back in the day the languages needed outside of pure hobbyists were very low level, took a long time, with little to no scalability to expand itself to keep future-proof.

[@ClayWheeler]

06:55 in 1992, 26 TeraBytes, in 100000 cartridges. Today, 32 TB cheap NAS for a ridiculously affordable price that you can carry anywhere

[@sarahwilliams755]

I have 16TB in just one MacBook Pro in the form of two 8TB which I great when had to move from hotel to hotel, could take all my music, films, games and documents with me. And the really crazy thing is that I could up grade it too 24TB by losing the thunderbolt chip and installing a M.2 drive mod chip. I could go much higher in drive space but the cost is just to high. It’s even more crazy that we have all this technology today from when this video was recorded who far can we go?

[@czerwonyniebieski]

SSD in 1988, nice

[@bobbymelbourne4502]

The narrator mentions 1992 many times so pretty sure this video originated in 1992.

[@spacedock873]

Yes he does, but if you look at the copyright message at the end it is dated 1988!

[@mitchell.9632]

@@spacedock873 It also said version 3.0 at the beginning.

[@myoriginalname]

They did so much research with so little computer power, almost makes you feel guilty for having a computer a gazillion times more powerful just sitting quietly in your bedroom solely for gaming purposes.