BBeM: Science, Technology & Medicine Item

Science, Technology & Medicine

Mainframe computers
Sperry UNIVAC 1108 (1964)

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Posted by Duff at 5:56 pm (PDT) on Sat May 9, 2009

My first experience with computers was with the Sperry UNIVAC 1108 at NYU's UHMC computer (back when NYU had an engineering school at a campus in the Bronx). The machine had 131K 36-bit words of magnetic core memory; that's about 512K bytes. The user files were stored on a FASTRAND magnetic drum, which held 22 million 36-bit words (90 MB). Yet, this computer (running at 1 MHz, I believe) served the entire engineering school AND ran a real-time transaction system for the NYU Medical Center. When I compare this with the amount of computing power on my desktop or laptop, I'm amazed and ashamed. Of course, the 1108 wasn't running Microsoft Windows.

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