
Paul Allen’s tech team brings 50-year-old supercomputer back from the dead - rbanffy
http://www.geekwire.com/2016/paul-allens-tech-team-brings-50-year-old-supercomputer-back-dead/
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bill_from_tampa
I can remember seeing some sort of a lunar lander program running on the
console screens of the CDC ?6600 at Indiana University in 1970, as I peered in
to the machine room waiting for my sad little student Fortran program to fail.

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DudeNet
If only he could also pay Signature Plastics to make keysets like this one
cheaper:
[https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=86143.0](https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=86143.0)

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devoply
Would a 50 year old supercomputer be still considered a supercomputer? I think
not. It would probably not even be considered a computer. More akin to a
calculator like the TI-series.

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rbanffy
Is a 1960's Formula 1 still a Formula 1 car?

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devoply
[https://www.reddit.com/r/formula1/comments/47j9x9/questionho...](https://www.reddit.com/r/formula1/comments/47j9x9/questionhow_fast_are_the_f1_cars_from_the_50s_and/)

> A 1956 Maserati 250F weights 550kgs and has 270hp. Top speed 290.

> So you would need a quite serious road car to beat it. But not impossible.

> A big performance factor are also the suspension, tires and brakes. 1950s
> tires were quite skinny and not really grippy compared to what you can find
> on a sport car today, so I would expect the performance gap to be more in
> favor of the modern car in the twisty bit and the braking.

> But to summarize, you daily driver would still be smashed by a 1956 F1 car,
> except if you daily drive an Ariel Atom, a Porsche GT3 or something even
> more exotic.

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filereaper
My memory is bad but I recall it was the CDC 6600 or one of the CDC's that
came up with Register Renaming right? The precursor to Tomasulo's Algorithm.

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rbanffy
I'd love to see some close-ups of the console screens. Maybe even a dump of
the geometry of the fonts (I'm guessing it's a calligraphic display)

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enf
Not much text is visible, but here is the picture I took there a few months
ago:
[https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/31080357160/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/31080357160/)

It is a vector display.

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rbanffy
It looks like the x,y are a bit slower than they should and that distorts the
letters a bit. It'd be cool if we could read the geometry data out of the
terminal. If it's a list of traces generated on the computer that gets
refreshed from time to time, it may be easier.

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jmclnx
at school we had a CDC, not sure if it was a 6200 or 6500. Wonder if I still
have a deck or two in an old box :)

