We get a private tour of the System Source Museum near Baltimore, MD. What a gem of a computer museum!
Stuff that supports the channel:
- Amazon links for the tools I use in the lab: www.curiousmarc.com/amazon-links
- Channel merch on Fourthwall: curiousmarc-shop.fourthwall.com
- Legacy channel merch on Teespring (I don't have everything transferred to Fourthwall yet): teespring.com/stores/curiousm...
- Support us on Patreon: / curiousmarc
"Elevator Music" Credit: Crinoline Dreams by Kevin MacLeod
Our lovely sponsors
- PCBWay: fast turn PCBs, www.pcbway.com
- Electro-Rent: www.electrorent.com
- Keysight: test instruments: www.keysight.com
- Samtec: connectors: www.samtec.com
- R&D Microwaves: rdmicrowaves.com
Get more technical info on the companion site: www.curiousmarc.com
Contact info: kzhead.infoa...
The Colossus was actually used to crack the Lorentz cypher, rather than Enigma. I would be very interested in a Curious Marc visit to the Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park!
The other guy mentions the actual name of the "computer" (it wasn't really a computer) created and used by Turing et al to crack the Enigma: Bombe. Also, Turing wasn't in charge of creating Colossus; it was created by a team led by a former postman called Tommy Flowers.
Bombe is how that machine that broke Enigma was called.
I second the Bletchley Park idea.
@@b43xoit And the first work on the Bombe was done in Poland - named after a kind of ice cream, I seem to remember. NCR ended up making them, again ISTR.
The "most popular" misnomer in the history of computing, I think... is "the Colossus / Enigma thing".
"Quick, the administrator is coming, bring in the machine that goes bing".
Fries are done. :)
@@idahofurnoooo, not family guy. Monty Python! kzhead.info/sun/ibWJeciSraGMZ58/bejne.htmlsi=BrfAQk-cRJQjh1ca
Ping!!
The big red machine next to the Cray-2 CPU prototype is a Y-MP EL, a Y-MP compatible machine which is about 1/2 the speed of the original Y-MP. It is a CMOS machine with four air-cooled processors on a VMEbus backplane and only requires standard 240V single-phase power. The Y-MP EL actually started out life at Supertek Computers as the S-2, the successor to the short-lived S-1 which was an X-MP compatible machine. A whole line of EL systems would follow the Y-MP EL.
A quick note about the Sperry radar display. The hood was needed to provide a dark environment for the VERY long persistence phosphor of the display. The holes in the sides are for your hands! You used a wax pencil to mark the display to note and track targets. The surface you wrote on was side illuminated and the wax would light up! I worked on early 1980s JRC (Japan Radio Company) radar displays that used similar technology.
@CuriousMarc 8:30 Colossus computer was made to break much more complicated Lorenz SZ40 tunny cypher. For Enigma's cypher they used Bombe electromechanical devices.
Pedantry corner: the Enigma was broken by the Bombe - Colossus was for breaking Lorenz ;)
That is correct!
Nice to see the Linotype typesetting machine at 19:52. I used to occasionally repair those when an apprentice back in the 60's at a printing house in the UK. They were engineered marvels :)
Sooo happy that these computers made it out of the barns/warehouse/garages and are being restored. It's one thing to collect. Another altogether to restore. 👍
The M51 Sky sweeper is just incredible. The designers worked out the mathematical calculations required for the system to complete its task but the real challenge was for engineers to work out which mechanism would give the required solution. Makes today R&D a walk in the park. The work done by Marc and the crew is so important as preservation of the physical device is only complete when we have an understanding of how it was made and be maintained. Bravo.
People always spoke in whispered awe at the prospect of what a cray could do back in the day. What a very cool place! Thank you for sharing.
Tommy Flowers, an engineer at the UK General Post Office, was the main man behind Colossus.
What a collection. I recognized that Univac 1218, it was the first computer I wrote "Hello World" on. Back in the late 60's at Vandenberg AFB in Santa Maria we had one in the lab used to run automatic tests on the Minuteman || ICBM's silo digital ground equipment . Our only input device was the front panel switches and the only output was a 4 digit numeric display. I think it had all of 16K words or core memory. Normal test code was loaded from aluminum backed Mylar punch tape. Tests would give you an error number which you looked up in the Teck Order to see what board to change in the UUT. Most of the time it would give false errors which turned out to be the test drivers, cables or connectors.
Marc just captured the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more to see than can be put into a video. Everything from an original Apple I, Curta calculators, an exhibit on telephone hacking (blue box), tic tac toe machines and even a 'display' of Rifa capacitors. Highly recommended museum! A must visit if you are anywhere near Baltimore.
Enigma was not broken by Colossus :-) Colossus was used of the fish cyphers generated by the Lorenz cypher machine
The gold cray board is a work of art. I'm very into goldwork embroidery and part of my brain is trying to work out how to replicate it.
Did they get that IBM 1800? That's the industrial version of the 1130. Actually the Colossus was developed to decrypt messages produced by the Lorenz machine, a much more advanced machine than the Enigma. An electromechanical machine called the 'Bombe' was developed to assist in breaking the Enigma codes, and there were several of them built.
Bob has an epic collection and is a great guy. He loves nothing more than to show off things, and tell you every intricate detail about it, and how it works, and showing you how it works! Love his collection. Its nice that he is close by!
Oh my geekness. What a phenomenal collection.
I have only a rank amateur's understanding of the stuff Marc gets into, but I do enjoy seeing experts at work.
I agree with you, some of the stuff he gets working is beyond my understanding of the system to diagnose properly 😂 I feel like I need to understand how something works before I consider myself able to properly diagnose and repair it, but I'm sure he might be out of his element with some things I'm great at, this is why it's beautiful when we come together to make things, design things, for fun or for actual work, I'm horrible at math, but my fingers are like pliers and I can align heavy objects, spacers a ground wire that bracket and a cover and get it first try or assemble complex things without being able to see anything, I have the ability to remember exactly what bolt and which washer goes where in what order weeks later, I would be absolutely stumped looking at the things he has diagnosed and repaired 😂 we all have strengths and weaknesses, I have been trying to find a few people in my area that will collaborate on some cool projects because that's when awesome things get built. I hope you are having a great day or night! Be safe my brother!
yea sometimes i think i start to understand it all but then i found out i was wrong about so many things and there are even more things you got to know or nothing will work and i get humiliated
I remember as a child in 1959-60 when my dad would drive the family at night along a road in the NASA side of Langley Field in Poquoson, Virginia. There was a huge building that hummed with dim light along the eaves. Dad would explain that computers were lined up inside and at work in an air conditioned environment. I could only guess then what it must have looked like. Now I know!
That many supercomputers is totally Cray Cray.
Tay Tay wouldn't understand Cray Cray
If you turned all the Crays on at once you'd black out the neighbourhood. One Cray-1 = 230kW approximately, or easily enough for 50 houses on average.
I love the chunky look of the displaywriter and datamaster 😊 Ah yes, the IBM plugboard "program" with its actual mechanical clock cycle. I used to wonder where RPG came from until i saw this machine.
10:00 That... thing... that doesn't know if it's a calculator or a typewriter is just wonderful.
Sorry, but Colossus WAS NOT used to decrypt Enigma Messages, it was used on the Lorenz SZ40/42 Teletype based machine!
I noticed that too. I think the code name for what Colossus was used on was; 'Tunny' (or Tuny) and it was way more difficult than Enigma (Ultra.) Because of Churchill's .....what? Paranoia? Concern, certainly, that Britain was going to use Colossus or something very like it, to go on breaking codes - this time the Soviet Union's, he ordered ALL, of the equipment at Bletchley Park be destroyed, the components burned and NEVER be mentioned again. Ever.. Because of THAT, the world was told and believed (and still does?) that ENIAC was the quote ; 'First Programmable Computer' unquote. It was not. Colossus was and it was not designed and built by a huge corporation with the backing of the US Navy, it was designed and built by a man called Tommy Flowers, with very little help, at the GPO (General Post Office, mostly telephones) Research and development centre at Dollis Hill, in London. That's why it was full of GPO 3000 type relays! The CuriousMarc guys ought to do a story just about Dollis Hill and the stuff they built for Turing and the Bletchley people.
What an incredibly cool place.
The Digibarn Alto was the first video of yours that I watched. Glad to see it has found a new home in Baltimore! Also, I agree with Ken, IBM should've went with 68000. I'm learning x86 assembly now and it's definitely more challenging than learning 6809 or 68000.
I remember seeing a similar IBM accounting machine outside my high school dean's office. It was in the waiting area, and when the patch panel was exposed, it was always a temptation to reach over and move some of the jumpers around.
You preserve history. You are very good.
I visited late last year, already some new things!!! The most memorable thing I saw was the linotype.
Visited yesterday. An absolute treasure trove and wonderfully friendly people who gladly spent their time giving me a tour. Do visit if you have a chance!
Around 15:20 : I've used one of these 'portable' PC's from IBM in the early 80's (but liked the ITT-3030 I used before the IBM PC was launched). You could use an external color display, have an Excel-like worksheet open on the internal display and simultaneously show the corresponding graph on the color screen
Nice to see the Bryant "Big Disc"! When I was working in Toronto (1974 - 1993) my employer (the Meteorological Service of Canada) did a lot of business with CNCP Telecommunications, who ran our national network on our behalf. This was a message switching application that was implemented on a pair of Collins C-8500 computers (one operating, one shadowing it on standby). It supported a national centre, eight regional weather forecasting centres, as well as over a hundred weather briefing and weather observing sites on 64 polled circuits, operating at speeds ranging from 110 - 600 bps. Storage was provided by six of the big Bryant drives -- slightly newer models than the ones shown in your video (dating from 1967) but with platters that were just as large. You could grip them at the hub, and they would just fit neatly under your arm, allowing you to carry them without dragging them on the floor. Head actuation was hydraulic, via a "drop adder", which had pistons that displaced one, two, four, and eight units of oil to allow the multiple heads (eight per surface, if I recall) to be set to one of sixteen track positions. All of that equipment was fully operational right into the late '80s, although parts were getting hard to come by -- mostly scavenged from other organizations as they decommissioned their Collins systems. I spent a lot of time with the CNCP staff at their site, because we were developing a replacement (based on Tandem NonStop systems) to allow CNCP to finally shut down their C-8500s. That occurred in 1988.
Thanks for the story!
these "mini" computers look so epic i saw them in old movies but didn't realise they were supposed to be computers. they look like something you would see in the background of older movies when they were at flight control or a military base. i wish some 80/90s desktop computers had lights and switches like this but that won't be very practical i guess
Nice video! Another cool museum in the Baltimore area is the National Electronics Museum, with a lot of early radar and defense electronics history...
What a fantastic place - these guys have such amazing knowledge from the early days of computing. Much respect.
If Baltimore wasn't half way across the world, I would have loved to donate some time ;)
same. Far too far away :(
This place is absolutely incredible! I would love to visit some day...
Love this stuff. I have either work with/on or have been close to many of the things you showed. My wife sitting next to me as I watched noticed my enthusiasm. As an example, working at Univac, I used Univac 418s, the commercial version of the Univac 1218. Keep up the good work. I watch your videos as soon as I notice a new one.
+1 Bucket List !
I had no idea such a collection was so close to home! I hope you enjoyed your visit!
Regarding that 1990s Cray machine @1:10, I saw a couple of those at a private collection a couple of years ago and there's a quite funny story with them. Basically, they had a big emergency stop button on the top middle part where it slants downwards. But they ended up putting a plastic shroud around it because with the machine being around 5 feet tall or so, it ended up being the perfect position for some unknowing colleague to put their elbow right on it when they came to see what was going on in the computer lab!
When Stanford AI was in the foothills, they had an 18 megaword (word = 36 bits) Librascope disk drive, with platters approaching if not exceeding those shown. Lab director Les Earnest has one such platter serving as a coffee table in his living room; I believe another is displayed in Stanford's Margaret Jacks Hall.
As a young person in high school, I got to use a Linotype at school. Hot, smelly, and mechanically cool, I have not forgotten the fun of typing with melted lead lines coming out. I look at all these old machines, recall when all of this was top of the line in computing equipment, even got to use some of them in the 70's. I marvel at how much things have changed over the decades.
Photographer passed up the chance to show the ETAOIN SHRDLU keys.
I worked on a LINC at UCLA. The console had 2 DACs that we played music on. I think one of the guys in our club coded Toccatta & Fuge in d-minor on it. The scope tube actually had code you could view the program.
@6:18 You are perceptive to pick up on the HP 'non-design design aesthetic'. I always liked how their Unix servers, like the K classes I had at my first job in the late 1990s, were so plain looking. Contrast with Sun and SGI who were trying to outdo each other in trendy looking fonts, etc.
Incredible. You could make a lifetime’s worth of videos just on the things there!
@16:28 top right corner a SBC that can outperform them all combined together.
From Baltimore it's just about half an hour of drive to another incredible museum: National Cryptologic Museum in Fort Mead (mentioned in the video), where you could see pieces of Alan Turing's Bombe, and many other early computing devices
Everyone's comment mentions the Bombe but I haven't seen anyone talk about the Robinsons.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heath_Robinson_(codebreaking_machine)
Wow! So much more stuff there than is shown on their website. And it's less than an hour from me. I shall most definitely be paying them at least one visit; it may take more than one visit to soak it all in! I'll also need to make sure the IBM 1130 is there and operating before I go (I kept looking for it in the background). That will one visit in itself.
Wow. I remember early UK computer systems. The biggest most dangerous being is drum storage. A large upright drum spinning at a very high speed, if the bearing failed which they did it would come out of the enclosure and spin across the floor. My best memory was of the Ferranti F100L and development of the F200, both silicone on saphire construction used in military applications and satellites, etc, as they were less prone to radiation and other damage in space. Thanks for another museum visit. I'd love to volunteer and bring some of my small collection but I live in the UK.
How did you slip this p*rn past the KZhead algorythim? Sweet machines indeed!
I know of a guy in Upstate New York that has a PDP 8e, an 11, and 12 in his basement that were all operational. Also has all the DEC Service documentstion, a paper tape encoder and reader two or three platter drives. I don't know what the status of them is at this point
wow - what a museum! If I am ever in or near Baltimore.....
Incredible museum! Did Baltimore have a large computer industry?
No, but they invented the Linotype!
Brilliant! What a great museum. I have only one complaint: the video was too short, for me anyway.
Awesome, simply awesome. Thanks so much for sharing.
Good gravy - what a collection - Complete amazement over here - cheers sir
incredible machines marc
I love this kind of computer museums! Recently visited the computer museum in Namur, Belgium (NAM-IP), they had quite a few old BULL punch card machines still working!
19:31 and he already has the AC half of the machine he is restoring up and running; now he just needs to tear into the DC half and get it good to go before he presses the button to completely boot it up!
thanks,. for taking us along,.
That IBM 519 at end looks like the WOPR
Let’s play a game of thermonuclear war on it!
@@CuriousMarc How about a nice game of chess?
When I think of the WOPR I think of machines like the IBM 604 which was a calculator which was designed to perform one operation on a large dataset presented to it on punched cards. The equation is wired into a plugboard which is inserted into the front of the machine. The only working 604 I know of is in the historic IBM plant in Sindelfingen, Germany.
The 519 wasn't a computer at all. It was a card reproducer. It could also be used as a card punch by an IBM 402 or 407, which were electro-mechanical automated desk calculators, more or less.
@@CuriousMarc I'm sure they have an IMSAI around, ha!
If everything were turned on, they'd need a dedicated nuclear reactor to power them all, and the massive AC to cool it. Cool stuff
Great vid, thank !
I love it. Just open it up and show things. Now don't get me wrong. Some stuff can break. But, you go to some places and they treat it like some special untouchable item. They older they are the more they was mfg. to be serviceable and repairable. A good example is a paper jam in a large office copier. Smack, bang, turn, look, and oh the jammed paper. Then, put all levels back. Close the front door. Press the copy button and hope for the best.
Fantastic!
Excellent
8:15 Finally, There's the machine that goes; *PING*
And the most expensive machine will be one of the Crays, of course...
We need to see that radar analog machine torn down and reverse engineered, and see it working!
Interesting!
That would be an amazing place to visit.
Thanks that was fun...
Back in the day.... seeing ONE Cray was near to a miracle.
Do they have a MAC-16 Lockheed computer? My mother used that to calculate the steel ropes for the elevators in the original World Trade Center so the cars wouldn’t bounce when they came to a stop.
Ха-ха! У них да же есть "Linotype"! Меня эта машина впечатлила да же больше, чем все компьютеры вместе взятые! Очень элегантный подход для своего времени! Советую посмотреть видео про эту машину! ))
you could definitely fix that bridge
This is very important stuff it should have it's own building at the Smithsonian one day people would kill to have these wonders of computing! If we don't preserve the past it will be lost to history!
You sure got some cool toys.
Wow would you look at that, that's the computer my professor did his thesis on! 1:15
This is Cray-Cray!
This looks like a wonderful place to visit. Too bad it's halfway across the planet and I'll likely never get the chance :/
I think this thing ran at one point too *casually turns on a computer that is older than many watching this video*
How many kWh need to start a cray mainframe and how many consume in use? In Argentina in the informatics museum they receive a donation from the meteorologic national service a silicon graphics mainframe and to start they need 230 volts 40 amp. I can imagine a cray mainframe.
Wikipedia says that the electrical power consumption of a Cray-1 is 115kW and the cooling mechanisms are at least as much again, so we are looking at 230kW or more. So at 230V it would require 1000A!
I want to know how much physical area a single bit takes up on that massive platter.
19:11 I made my own radar scope display using a real radar tube that shows real air traffic via ADS-B. I have video of it on my channel. Would be cool if someone could do something similar with this one.
I didn't know that was there.
Love the channel, but, Enigma was not broken by colossus, most of the work on recovering the enigma key and therefore breaking the code was don by hand and the electromechanical Bombes which stepped through the daily settings provided by the hand crafted 'Crib'. Colossus was used in the decryption of the Lorenze cypher (code name Tunny).
There's so much sexiness in this video, it's hard to contain myself! Thank you so much for the insights Marc! I need to get out there.
8Mb per platter? That's only about 80 million bits, those bits are not all that tiny with that enormous disk 🤣
Cray, Cray and more Cray. You might say Cray-on?
when engineer was engineer!
16:00 I would re-watch the video with Stan Lebar in the early television museum if someone writes a transcript of it, the audio is really bad.
ship happens
Bonjour, je suis assez surpris comment vous avez trouvé le budget pour l'achat de ce matériel, comme le Cray.
Tous ces musés sont gérés par des ex-pontes de la Silicon Valley et sont probablement financé par le mécénat, du reste la plupart de ce matériel proviens des collections privées et ne font probablement pas l'objet de transactions commerciales.
5100 and no John Titor references? 😂
Colosus had broken the Lorentz-Machine not the Enigma
I think I'd just like to lie down and die right there. To me, this looks like the closest thing to heaven on Earth.
Colossus broke Tunny, not Enigma.
Enigma was broken by a team of three Polish mathematicians in 1933, not by Allan Turning
No views?! How can that be?
Because you are third! one more piece of broken bridge for you.