May 13, 2010 at 23:08Report from the computer museum in SPIIRAN
Hello!
I am reporting from the computer museum located at the St. Petersburg Institute of Informatics RAS. Here are collected cars that are 20-30 years old, their lifeless "bodies" now inspire only sacred reverence for those who are in the subject, but at one time they served the needs of many institutes in St. Petersburg.
I managed to get here completely by accident and unexpectedly, and according to the law of meanness, I only had a phone with a camera with me, a normal soap box lying around at home = (, therefore the quality of the photos allows us to understand only the big picture. Although this is insignificant, you get the greatest buzz only by seeing and even with your own hands having touched it all live.
So let's get started soon! (Caution, traffic!)
At the entrance to the right we are greeted by such a good “hank” of ball two- and three-button mice, right there we see a stand with motherboards of different years, a couple of relatively old dial-up modems (of course not 56Kbit / s) and a calculating machine. On the lower shelf are already compact hard drives. The leftmost of them is the “modern size”. Feel the progress?
A large photo of BESM-2 in the process of work is hanging on the wall. As the attendant prompts, such machines did not remain only because they used a lot of gold in detail. Such is life ...
But let's not talk about sad things. Turning my head to the right, I notice a shelf with distributions of Microsoft Windows 95, Microsoft Office 97 and Microsoft Mouse & Microsoft Paintbrush. And also a strange box of Framework II.
We pass a little ahead and see a cabinet two meters high and also about two long - what do you think it is? CPU. Behind him in the closet is half the size of this network interface. All this was cooled by air, water and even freon, even its own separate energy meter was built into the cabinet! The machine is no longer “ours” and does not contain gold.
In front of the machine, there is a terminal with a screen and a mini-keyboard by today's standards, including no familiar cursor keys and Enter keys. The "excursion" was in a hurry, unfortunately it was not possible to inquire in detail the characteristics of this monster - there will be an occasion to come back here even more thoroughly!
Seamlessly move on to the means of information storage.
The first one we have is a device for reading “classical” punch cards - we put punch cards on top, the machine drives them through itself and gives them out from below. Pretty compact thing compared to other exhibits.
Two cabinets for reading information from magnetic tapes are adjacent to it - by the way, one bobbin holds 500 megabytes! Good volume for those years, to say the least. By the way, how is it now, often still use magnetic tapes?
But what about hard drives? I notice them on the right along with the reader. A "miniature" such a "flash drive" of 100 megabytes and weighing a couple of kilograms. And this is only the hard drive itself, another device for reading it the size of a washing machine.
And then our 10 minutes came to an end ... In a hurry, having photographed another old PC and an unknown control device, we were "asked".
Personally, it was very interesting for me to watch all this live and in a not quite official atmosphere. Why didn’t I come back later and take pictures of everything with a good camera? The museum is located on the territory of the institute and visiting it only upon request, it is not a museum of open access. When will he still be this time? We must seize the moment!
I hope you enjoyed this mini-report, I accept the wishes, questions and amendments to the article in PM and on any of the contacts in the profile.
Thanks for attention!
I am reporting from the computer museum located at the St. Petersburg Institute of Informatics RAS. Here are collected cars that are 20-30 years old, their lifeless "bodies" now inspire only sacred reverence for those who are in the subject, but at one time they served the needs of many institutes in St. Petersburg.
I managed to get here completely by accident and unexpectedly, and according to the law of meanness, I only had a phone with a camera with me, a normal soap box lying around at home = (, therefore the quality of the photos allows us to understand only the big picture. Although this is insignificant, you get the greatest buzz only by seeing and even with your own hands having touched it all live.
So let's get started soon! (Caution, traffic!)
At the entrance to the right we are greeted by such a good “hank” of ball two- and three-button mice, right there we see a stand with motherboards of different years, a couple of relatively old dial-up modems (of course not 56Kbit / s) and a calculating machine. On the lower shelf are already compact hard drives. The leftmost of them is the “modern size”. Feel the progress?
A large photo of BESM-2 in the process of work is hanging on the wall. As the attendant prompts, such machines did not remain only because they used a lot of gold in detail. Such is life ...
But let's not talk about sad things. Turning my head to the right, I notice a shelf with distributions of Microsoft Windows 95, Microsoft Office 97 and Microsoft Mouse & Microsoft Paintbrush. And also a strange box of Framework II.
We pass a little ahead and see a cabinet two meters high and also about two long - what do you think it is? CPU. Behind him in the closet is half the size of this network interface. All this was cooled by air, water and even freon, even its own separate energy meter was built into the cabinet! The machine is no longer “ours” and does not contain gold.
In front of the machine, there is a terminal with a screen and a mini-keyboard by today's standards, including no familiar cursor keys and Enter keys. The "excursion" was in a hurry, unfortunately it was not possible to inquire in detail the characteristics of this monster - there will be an occasion to come back here even more thoroughly!
Seamlessly move on to the means of information storage.
The first one we have is a device for reading “classical” punch cards - we put punch cards on top, the machine drives them through itself and gives them out from below. Pretty compact thing compared to other exhibits.
Two cabinets for reading information from magnetic tapes are adjacent to it - by the way, one bobbin holds 500 megabytes! Good volume for those years, to say the least. By the way, how is it now, often still use magnetic tapes?
But what about hard drives? I notice them on the right along with the reader. A "miniature" such a "flash drive" of 100 megabytes and weighing a couple of kilograms. And this is only the hard drive itself, another device for reading it the size of a washing machine.
And then our 10 minutes came to an end ... In a hurry, having photographed another old PC and an unknown control device, we were "asked".
Personally, it was very interesting for me to watch all this live and in a not quite official atmosphere. Why didn’t I come back later and take pictures of everything with a good camera? The museum is located on the territory of the institute and visiting it only upon request, it is not a museum of open access. When will he still be this time? We must seize the moment!
I hope you enjoyed this mini-report, I accept the wishes, questions and amendments to the article in PM and on any of the contacts in the profile.
Thanks for attention!