[Beowulf] A press release

Gerry Creager gerry.creager at tamu.edu
Thu Jul 10 13:41:35 PDT 2008


Robert G. Brown wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Jul 2008, Lyle Bickley wrote:
> 
>> On Thursday 10 July 2008, Robert G. Brown wrote:
>> --snip--
>>> Aye, laddy, 'twas a PDP 1 with sense switches on the front that one did
>>> indeed toggle in the paper tape boot program (to get it to where it
>>> could read from other media), a green oscilloscope-style CRT for a
>>> monitor (complete with crosshatches IIRC), a real teletype console, and
>>> the ability to run simple fortran programs that did beam optic
>>> computations and displayed a simple visualization of same.  The PDP
>>> itself was quite large, and I was told that it "had a few bad bits..."
>>> but that they usually didn't affect the outcome of a computation.
>>
>> I'm on the PDP-1 and IBM 1620 Restoration Teams at the Computer 
>> History Museum
>> (see: http://www.computerhistory.org/pdp-1/). So if the PDP-1 was your 
>> first
>> computer (and one NEVER forgets their first computer) you can see it in
>> action (running Spacewar!, Minskytron, Music, etc.) at the CHM!
>>
>> In fact, if your visiting Silicon Valley, I'll give you a private tour!
> 
> Cool!  I think TUNL finally got rid of theirs -- always a shame,
> somehow, when a magnificent thing like that dies.
> 
>> Funny combination - setting up Beowulf clusters and restoring vintage
>> computers. There must be a lesson here :-)
> 
> Vintage clusters?

Only if running something earlier than WINE 0.3
-- 
Gerry Creager -- gerry.creager at tamu.edu
Texas Mesonet -- AATLT, Texas A&M University
Cell: 979.229.5301 Office: 979.862.3982 FAX: 979.862.3983
Office: 1700 Research Parkway Ste 160, TAMU, College Station, TX 77843




More information about the Beowulf mailing list