Report from the Computer Museum in SPIIRAN
Hello!
I report from the computer museum, which is located at the St. Petersburg Institute of Informatics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Here cars are assembled, which are 20-30 years old, their lifeless “bodies” now instill only a sacred reverence for those who are in the subject, but at one time they served the needs of many St. Petersburg institutions.
I managed to get here quite by accident and unexpectedly, and according to the law of meanness, only a camera phone turned out to be with me, a normal soap box lying around at home = (, therefore, the quality of photos only allows you to understand the big picture. Although it is insignificant - you only get the most buzz touching it all live.
So let's start soon! (be careful, traffic!)
At the entrance to the right, we are met by a nice “hank” of ball two- and three-button mice, right there we see a stand with motherboards from different years, a couple of relatively ancient dial-up modems (of course not 56Kbit / s) and a counting machine. Already compact hard drives were placed on the bottom shelf. The leftmost one is the “modern size”. Feel the progress?
On the wall hangs a large photo of BESM-2 in the process. As the accompanying person suggests, there are no such machines left only because they used a lot of gold in details. That is life…
But let's not talk about sad things. Turning my head to the right, I notice the shelf with the Microsoft Windows 95, Microsoft Office 97 and Microsoft Mouse & Microsoft Paintbrush distributions. As well as a strange box Framework II.
We pass a little forward and see a cabinet with a height of two meters and a length of about two meters too - what do you think it is? CPU. Behind him in the cabinet is half the size of this located network interface. All this was cooled with air, water and even freon, even its own separate electricity meter is built into the cabinet! The machine is no longer "our" and does not contain gold.
In front of the car there is a terminal with a screen and a mini-keyboard for today's standards, including the usual cursor keys and the Enter key. "Excursion" was in a hurry, unfortunately it was not possible to question in detail the characteristics of this monster - there will be a reason to come back here and more thoroughly!
Smoothly proceed to the means of storing information.
First we have a device for reading “classic” punched cards - we put punched cards on top, the machine drives them through itself and gives them out from below. Quite a compact thing compared to other exhibits.
Adjacent to it are two cabinets for reading information from magnetic tapes - by the way, one reel holds 500 megabytes! Good volume for those years, to say the least. By the way, how is it now, often still use magnetic tapes?
Well, what about hard drives? I notice them on the right along with the device for reading. "Miniature" such a "flash drive" at 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 ... Hurriedly, having shot another old PC and an unknown control device, we were “asked”.
For me personally, it was very interesting to see all this live and in a not quite official setting. Why did I not come back later and did not photograph everything on a good camera? The museum is located on the territory of the institute and visiting it only by request, it is not an open access museum. When will he be this time? We must seize the moment!
I hope you liked this mini- “report”, I accept suggestions, questions and amendments to the article in a personal and on any of the contacts in the profile.
Thanks for attention!
I report from the computer museum, which is located at the St. Petersburg Institute of Informatics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Here cars are assembled, which are 20-30 years old, their lifeless “bodies” now instill only a sacred reverence for those who are in the subject, but at one time they served the needs of many St. Petersburg institutions.
I managed to get here quite by accident and unexpectedly, and according to the law of meanness, only a camera phone turned out to be with me, a normal soap box lying around at home = (, therefore, the quality of photos only allows you to understand the big picture. Although it is insignificant - you only get the most buzz touching it all live.
So let's start soon! (be careful, traffic!)
At the entrance to the right, we are met by a nice “hank” of ball two- and three-button mice, right there we see a stand with motherboards from different years, a couple of relatively ancient dial-up modems (of course not 56Kbit / s) and a counting machine. Already compact hard drives were placed on the bottom shelf. The leftmost one is the “modern size”. Feel the progress?
On the wall hangs a large photo of BESM-2 in the process. As the accompanying person suggests, there are no such machines left only because they used a lot of gold in details. That is life…
But let's not talk about sad things. Turning my head to the right, I notice the shelf with the Microsoft Windows 95, Microsoft Office 97 and Microsoft Mouse & Microsoft Paintbrush distributions. As well as a strange box Framework II.
We pass a little forward and see a cabinet with a height of two meters and a length of about two meters too - what do you think it is? CPU. Behind him in the cabinet is half the size of this located network interface. All this was cooled with air, water and even freon, even its own separate electricity meter is built into the cabinet! The machine is no longer "our" and does not contain gold.
In front of the car there is a terminal with a screen and a mini-keyboard for today's standards, including the usual cursor keys and the Enter key. "Excursion" was in a hurry, unfortunately it was not possible to question in detail the characteristics of this monster - there will be a reason to come back here and more thoroughly!
Smoothly proceed to the means of storing information.
First we have a device for reading “classic” punched cards - we put punched cards on top, the machine drives them through itself and gives them out from below. Quite a compact thing compared to other exhibits.
Adjacent to it are two cabinets for reading information from magnetic tapes - by the way, one reel holds 500 megabytes! Good volume for those years, to say the least. By the way, how is it now, often still use magnetic tapes?
Well, what about hard drives? I notice them on the right along with the device for reading. "Miniature" such a "flash drive" at 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 ... Hurriedly, having shot another old PC and an unknown control device, we were “asked”.
For me personally, it was very interesting to see all this live and in a not quite official setting. Why did I not come back later and did not photograph everything on a good camera? The museum is located on the territory of the institute and visiting it only by request, it is not an open access museum. When will he be this time? We must seize the moment!
I hope you liked this mini- “report”, I accept suggestions, questions and amendments to the article in a personal and on any of the contacts in the profile.
Thanks for attention!
')
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/93510/
All Articles