Behold ATLAS, the fastest computer of 50 years ago
Britain's first supercomputer remembered on its birthday
Cloud storage: Lower cost and increase uptime
Think today's computing industry moves fast? Try that of decades past. Moore's Law predicts that processor power will double every couple of years or so, but on December 7, 1962, the scientific computing power of the entire UK is said to have doubled in a single day.
That was the day they switched on the original Ferranti Atlas, the UK's first supercomputer – and for a time one of the fastest machines in the world – which celebrates its 50th birthday on Friday.
Over at Google's Europe Blog, the Chocolate Factory has put together an essay and a short video about the Atlas to commemorate the event, including interviews with some of the men involved with building and maintaining the colossal number-cruncher.
Just those basic tasks were no mean feats, given the technology of the time. Although the Atlas used transistors, rather than the valves – vacuum tubes, in US lingo – found in earlier computers, it still needed to be hand-assembled from countless components.
As former Atlas maintenance engineer John Crowther explains in the video, assembling the second Atlas at the University of London took six months.
"When we had finished commissioning, we eventually got to a point where the machine would run for ten minutes without fail, and at that point we all cheered and went to the pub to celebrate surviving ten minutes," Crowther explains.
Keeping the thing running wasn't easy, either. The factory used to manufacture Atlas was originally used to build railway engines, and as a result the components would arrive thickly coated with soot. Crowther estimates that around a third of the system faults his team handled were due to dirt.
Still, it was worth it. The Atlas delivered nearly a hundred-fold advance in processing power over previous computers and it brought many innovations, including virtual memory and a multitasking operating system. With Atlas, calculations that used to take hours would take minutes.
Naturally, that kind of advance didn't come cheap. Each of the three Atlas machines that were eventually built sold for around £2.5m, or about £50m in today's currency. Processor time was billed at around £750-800 per hour – and that's in 1962 pounds sterling.
Ah, but it was a short-lived era. The last Atlas was decommissioned in 1976, just 14 years after the first was put into service, as newer models made them obsolete.
After all, as Crowther points out in Google's video, "People thought only one Atlas would be needed, ever. And now, your washing machine has a more powerful computer in it than Atlas did." ®
COMMENTS
Re: Compute time was billed at around £750-800 per hour
Use of a verb form (a participle) as an adjective requires the present or past participle of the verb. So, this would require 'computing time' or 'computed time'. (cf. 'baking apple' and 'baked apple', but _not_ 'bake apple')
If you want to use the noun as an adjective (cf. 'apple pie', 'car park') then you'd need to say 'computer time'.
Using the bare verb form, 'compute time', is the equivalent of saying "Don't talk now, it's not talk time, it's eat time." It looks and sounds clumsy and ugly. However, language changes fastly in this modern world and I look forward to more of these disruptive read experiences.
Re: What are the specs?
Actually quite substantial, according to the wikipedia page. It had 48 bit words, with 16kw of RAM and 96kw of drum storage --- that's 96kB and 576kB --- mapped into a 24-bit virtual address space, and what looked like paging between drum and core so that applications could use the full address space. It had an MMU, full interrupt systems and was asynchronously clocked (something that's still not done much today). Performance seems to have been about 500000 flops.
The washing machine comment is a bit harsh: this is way more powerful than the kind of embedded PIC you find in that sort of thing, and even beats a lot of 8-bit microcontrollers of today. I think it's roughly equivalent to about the 16-bit microcontroller class, although you'll need to find one with an FPU.
Does anyone have a reference to the instruction set?
Re: Compute time was billed at around £750-800 per hour
Compute time != computer time. ATLAS was a multi tasking system, so in modern parlance the CPU time spent solving your pet problem (i.e. the "compute" time) would not be the same as the amount of elapsed time the computer spent running your program. Or in other words, even if it took an hour to run a program to completion, it may have only actually applied 5 minutes of actual compute time to it during that period.
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