Computer Dinosaurs Just A Memory Museum Displays Huge Mainframes Of Teryear

While the typical dinosaur tends to be something gigantic, stupid and dead, the new monsters in George Keremedjiev’s museum could return to life someday.

That is, if most of the neighborhood around the American Computer Museum didn’t mind a massive electrical power outage.

Last week, Keremedjiev and a crew of movers installed a herd of 30-year-old dinosaurs he found buried in storage at the University of Calgary in Alberta. Although the huge mainframe computers are still in working condition, they would require more electricity just to turn on than is used in the entire building.

And for all that effort, the most powerful of the group, an IBM 360, could barely think its way out of a paper bag. With just 128 kilobytes of operating memory, it has the intellectual firepower of the average speed-dial button on a telephone.

“You can’t even begin to compare a Nintendo Gameboy to one of these,” Keremedjiev said. “It’s a snail compared to a stealth bomber.”

But in its day, it was the Tyranosaurus rex of the business world.

One of these big old computers could monitor accounts receivable, keep the payroll records of a major business or produce a spreadsheet showing a store’s sales - as long as a team of operators stayed up all night feeding it computer cards.

And it only weighed three tons.

It had a few other exciting features not seen on modern computers, such as:

A big red panic button that would kill power to the machine if it went haywire, a frequent occurrence.

A wire-mesh “rat trap” to keep rodents from chewing through the wire insulation.

A built-in desk. Did your lap-top come with one of those?

In addition to the keypunch operators, the old IBM also required a staff of maintenance technicians and degree-holding computer scientists to keep it running.

For Keremedjiev, it has filled an important missing link in his computer museum. The Model 360 used integrated circuits, the technological leap between vacuum tubes and microprocessors.

In historical terms, he now has an example of every major electronic innovation that took the world from muscle power to the Computer Age, which happens to be a span of about 35 years.