The following message is a courtesy copy of an article that has been posted to bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers as well.
[email protected] (Ed Gould) writes: > I do not remember the power requirements of the computers back then > but they had to have been huge so I do not think that a home computer > was even remotely possible. Maybe some of the real old timers that > remember what they were and how much it cost. Even in the 1950's > electricity was expensive. WHich sort of brings up the side issue if > it was for a submarine where were they going to get the power? not just electricity but power and water for cooling. at the univ. in the 60s, it still had (20,000? tube) 709. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_709 i vaguely remember something about datacenter having a cooling unit rated at 20tons ... quicky web search for 20ton air condition; 480v, 36kW (possibly units from 50s/60s were less efficient): http://www.portablerentalsolutions.com/pc/viewPrd.asp?idcategory=0&idproduct=66 this reference has a 709 datacenter at 94.8kW for 709 & 26.5 ton cooling unit (318,750 BTU/hr) http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/BRL61-ibm0709.html above has USN OTS China Lake, 70kW for the computer and 87kW for the air conditioner. Above article has several other configurations ... somewhat in the 100kW to 300kW range. when univ. 709 was replaced with 360/67 ... there were some issues with recalibrating things for significantly lower heat output. later in the early 70s at the science center ... the 360/67 machine room had cooling units that dumped water from six inch pipe straight into eight inch sewer pipe; some building code that there was "air gap" between the two. In the mid-70s there was starting to be something about city wanting to change building codes that there would be no more straight through water for cooling ... and would need to start to require recirculating water. This would require water towers on the roof and there was big issues that the office buildings had not been built to handle the weight of water towers on the roof. in stories about pacific northwest ... and all the hydroelectric plants ... that bonneville power authority had enough excess electricity that aluminum smelting plants were being built to consume the excess (at discount). the area is more recently seeing a new generation with "mega" datacenters ... also using huge amounts of electricity and water. a couple old refs: http://www.informationweek.com/galleries/showGallery.jhtml?galleryID=62 http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.10/cloudware_pr.html in the 90s, the head of boca had large contract with Dataquest (since bought by gartner) to investigate what future "PC" computers were to look like ... which included a several hr video taped round-table with dozen silicon valley experts. I knew the Dataquest people and they asked me to be one of the experts ... they said that they would garble the introductions so Boca wouldn't realize it had a ringer (I did clear it with my line-of-business executives first). I had been hassling boca business people in internal forums ... because their projections on future volume pricing for PCs didn't even correspond with volume one, local sunday newspaper advertisements (aka their projections for volume pricing was significantly higher than volume one, off-the-shelf prices). -- 42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
