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The age of big iron

Modern computers are small, fast, cost-effective and energy efficient.

that's not how things were back in the 1960s.

Back then, computers were huge, heavy, slow (by today's standards) and incredibly expensive. This was the era of the mainframe computer, a machine that often filled an entire floor of a building and required specialist climate control and dedicated fire-prevention systems.

This was the age of "big iron".

It's crazy to think that your average smartphone now has more memory, more storage and vastly more compute-power than those old big-iron systems -- yet that phone will slip snugly into your pocket and run all day on a single charge.

So why exactly were those mainframe computers so expensive?

From the outside, the rows of cabinets and spinning tape drives look impressive but nowhere near as impressive as they look on the inside.

Old mainframes had miles of wiring, quite a bit of it being laboriously hand-installed by skilled workers.

These machines also often relied on magnetic core memory which was, yet again, manufactured by teams of ladies with dainty fingers and staggering dexterity.

If you've ever wanted to see just how these gigantic computers of yester-year were built, take a look at the video below. I ran across this yesterday and found it absolutely fascinating:

It is perhaps only once you've seen the scale of these old boxes that you truly realise just how much we've crammed into today's modern CPUs and memory chips.

Right now I'm spending far too much time watching videos about the "big iron" era of computing and the more I watch, the more I'm in awe of the technology we have today.

It's kind of ironic however, that an industry that started with huge computers housed in climate-controlled environments and consuming massive amounts of power, is now headed back in the same direction, as AI datacentres become the backbone of modern computing.

We've come full circle perhaps?

Carpe Diem folks!

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