At the 1 hour mark, you note that the i7-920 didn't often show a performance gain. Having been an early adopter of it, moving from the Q6600, I have to strongly disagree with that. The difference was obvious and noticeable the minute you did more than treat it as a "faster older PC". The multi-tasking performance was astounding and the overall responsiveness was a step up. I ended up buying 2 of them in 2009 to replace both of my Core2Quads at my office, the difference was noticeable enough.
And now with LLM algorithms, new experiments with electronic implants, and corporations vying for end product control, we are moving along towards a cyberpunk dystopia.
A bit late to the party, but here are some pedantic notes: * AIRESEARCH should be pronounced "air research" with the two Rs kind of running into each other, BUSICOM is a portmanteau of "business" and "computer" so it should be pronounced "busy-com", MITS is generally pronounced "mitts", and TAITO is "tie-toe". * It's splitting hairs slightly, but the Atari VCS used a 6507 not a 6502. * Apple were not the last manufacturer of 680x0 computers; even if you exclude the TecToy-manufactured Sega Genesis that was still being produced until 2023 there were oddities like the DraCo, Emerson produced a bunch of 68040 and 68060 VME bus SBCs way into the 2000s, and they're still heavily used in industrial control systems and telecoms equipment. * Not sure by what metric the BBC was "one of the best selling home computers of the period". C64 12-17 million, MSX 9-4 million, Apple II 6 million, ZX Spectrum 5 million, Atari 8-bit 4 million, CPC 464 2 million, BBC 1.5 million. Essentially, apart from abject failures like the Dragon 32 and Oric Atmos it was one of the *worst* selling micros! Source: I'm old.
Good vid. You should have way more subscribers. Might I humbly suggest you change your channel name to something a little more unique? It reads like one of the many, many AI channels atm.
Although these super computer companies produced a lot of inovative wild tech, now your pocket computer (mobile phone) has more processing power and memory than the last generation of super computers from the 80s. Super computing now is now about parallelisation because we've pretty much reached the physical limit of what can be acheived with semi conductors.
This is an EXCELLENT video. That was really "the time to be in the computer industry," that's for sure. When it was still about the clever technology more than about manufacturing economies of scale. Modern supercomputers are... boring by comparison, frankly. They're amazing, but just not inspiring in the same way.
Found this through a news letter to old CDC graduates. Brought back memories for me of many of the early players. A wonderful introduction of the importance of the labs and Sid Fernbach to early computing. LRL Livermore (Sid Fernbach) bought the first CDC 3600, the first CDC 6600, the first CDC 7600 and the first CDC Star 100. Seymour Cray was unique in the computer industry: First Transistor computer, first RISC, first multi functional unit design, first instruction stack, then pipeline, first short vector approach, and always the most aggressive packaging and his ability to completely stop one design approach and go to a new one. Congratulations on a well done journey from concepts in the 50's to the last super computers of the early 90's. I enjoyed 29 years on that journey until 1989.
Really good. About the only quibble is that the 37 cent transistors Cray used in 1960 would have been in TO-5 cases, like a pencil eraser. The flat epoxy transistors you show are from 1967 or so.
Does Cray make any other computers and why did other manufacturers not make S computers ? In the mid-90's I read about S computer maker by Hitachi that was used to track the flow of water through a coffee filter !.
in the 70ies and 80ies I worked for a machine shop in Hopkins, Mn making spindles for the disc drives for those computers. These things were massive as a 5 mg memory disc was the size of a record album. we made them by the thousands for control data and MPI.
I got to stop in the Air&Space Smithsonian in DC not too long ago. They have a CRAY-1 on display. Pretty bad ass, lots of covers are removed so that you can see wiring, circuit boards, and the power supplies.
So cray invented the computer. By putting invention over capitalism. While Singapore was responsible for his success. Without the chips invented in Singapore; cray's computer would be a pipe dream.
Feels like this video needs an addendum now that Apple have released a few versions of their Arm desktop/laptop processors? Is Arm still the future or is RISC-V a better long term bet? Also would’ve been good if you’d covered a few of the problems various manufacturers had, such as the Pentium floating point bug and spectre/meltdown!
"the first bomb was developed with mechanical computers" at the time of Los Almos, they had punch card processing machines. These IBM machines were capable of running through a deck of computer cards and perform a single math operation on them, programmed by a pluggable electronics board in the machine. One of the scientists at Los Almos figured out how to perform complex calculations on large data sets by running the decks multiple times and changing the electronics board and running it again, over and over. Thus, before a true computer was available, complex calculations were possible.
How odd that you didn't mention either ATI or AMD. Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering also deserved a mention. They were god-send for gorgeous 3D gaming, in an era of horrible jaggedness.
Univac made out of "fishing wire"? Hunh? What's that? And no, a Naval officer with the rank of Commander is not a "recruit," as the video suggests at 5:25.
Great job! I was there at there back in the 80's and worked in computer retail through to 2008. It was a fantastic journey and your video brought the memories flooding back. Thank you!
Bravo! What a great video. Very interesting and held my attention through to the very end. I pretty much have lived through this whole transition in the home computer world. This was spot on and didn't really miss a thing. Well done!
There was also a smaller version of the Star 100, produced by CDC in Canada but the project was eventually cancelled. I worked there in the 1970's until the company folded.
I like the history of this video my father worked with the Herman Hollerith punch-card system. It is now all made digital, and the Quantum Computing Fysica will make a progress too in the computerindustry I suppose. Lightsignal-data transmission will be the issue. That speed can't be faster then the speed of light.
When reading the comments ... I feel they double the brilliant(!) content of the vid with the same qualitiy, background stories, personel expieriences and so on. I love that. And to emphasis: No gaming world and no LLMs without Cray's vetorization.
