Congratulation to George K5TR. He gottem all.
The year I was looking for was 1945, although I accepted 43, when
it was first envisioned, 44, when it was built, 45 when it did
the actual computing, or 46, when it was formally unveiled. It
was later used in the Manhattan project.
It has 17,486 tubes, although some sources quote 18000. ( guess
you might need a few spares. Both answers were acceptable.
It's primary purpose and that which it was used in November 1945,
was to compute artillery firing tables. Almost gave W2UP credit
for that one. He said "military use-classfied". That's what he
gets for being a "Yankee"
RAMAC was the first computer to use a hard drive.
Lotsa near misses here...,most giving 24" as the size of the
disks, which is correct. Out of 10 disks, the got 5 megabytes.
Sounds like something I might build. But the questions was the
"physical size of the hard drive" and the correct answer is about
the size of 2 refrigerators.
And of course, the device in today's language would be a hard
drive.
So, it was lots of fun, and again, I am most impressed with those
of you who replied. ( almost 100 )
But, I must offer my apologies to those on towertalk. Just got a
message generally addressed to the group in which the Sysgod
mentioned that towertalk must be addressed as "TO" and not as
"CC". I'll make that up to you guys someday.
Thanks again to all, and to the Sysgods for a slight deviation
from "thread"
I had fun.
Decision of "El Supremo de Judge" is final. Protests may be sent
by mail to
"El Supremo"
POB 73
Kingman Reef, Pacific Ocean
73
Ed
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