Inside Adam Savage's Cave: Geeking Out about Bits and Bytes
Вставка
- Опубліковано 5 жов 2024
- Tested returns to Adam's workshop to geek out about his collection of arcane computer technology. Adam shows off an old IBM bit, byte, and even a massive one gigabyte hard drive from 1981--which weighs 75 pounds.
- Наука та технологія
![ASM 1.13+ TR-DOS - Zont/ASC/Himik's ZxZ 2024 [Как пишут AY музыку на ZX Spectrum]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/GHfSVb2nfJQ/mqdefault.jpg)
Want more videos from inside Adam Savage's cave? Check out our playlist: bit.ly/2FpjcBR
When you're waving your hands around in excitement, I can't help but panic if you accidentally knocked over any of those legendary pieces of art ahhh.
I worked on the old Honeywell mainframes back in the 1970's/80's. Our stuff did not have tubes it used ferrite beads. The beads would hold the memory contents even after a power out and would take off after the power came back. You could even take out a 4k module and plug it into another computer somewhere else and it would run what job you had running. The module would be about the size of a lunchbox.
I know im late but that is incredibly interesting, I had no idea hardware like that was available back then, ive never even heard of useing ferrite beads instead of vacum tubes! Thanks for the cool info!
Have to watch this video in a couple of decades ;)
lol, so true
Watching in 2020. Remind myself in 2050 to re-watch!
"1500 cubic kilometers. That's like bigger than"....
It's a fucking Borg Cube.
+mike b (Fugenchutenz) HOLY SHIT. IT IS LITERALLY JUST A BIG FUCKING BORG. I THOUGHT YOU WERE JOKING TILL I GOT TO THAT PART.
+mike b (Fugenchutenz)
Wish you hadn't said that.
Now i can't stop imagining a Borg Cube, with hundreds of drones just replacing vacuum tubes,
to keep the collective alive.
+book5ter you will be assimilated, resistance is futile, replace that vacuum tube
Borg cube makes perfect sense the thing looks like vacuum tube bits
And it also makes sense why they constantly assimilate cause of the maintenance required changing tubes!
It's just so mind blowing to watching this on cell phone with 16gb of memory....
And here we go - watching it on a smartphone with 128gb of memory... Just 3 years later.
And six years on I’m still only 256gb on my smartphone but my laptop has 1TB and my portable SSD drive has an extra 2TB (which is smaller and lighter than the smartphone)
The 8 vacuum tube device was NOT for an 8 bit byte. The 700 series systems used BCD which represented values in 6 bit words. That is why there are only 6 of the one type of dual-triode tube. The others were probably for calculating 'parity'.
BTW - I started programming in '69 on an IBM-360 Model 30 using assembler.
As someone who is learning how to program at a university and taking an assembler class right now, god bless you
bo ter berg The 'start' and 'stop' bits come into play when doing asynchronous communications - a throw back to the days when mechanical teletypes were common. It enables the simple transmission of a single character. Bytes the are stored in RAM will be of nine bits - 8 data bits and one parity bit.
binary coded decimal. airlines still use six bit words for their passenger name records. which is why your name is in all caps.
The 701/703 actually used 36 and 38 bits for calculations. The 8-bit byte didn't FORMALLY exist until the early 1990s. (as a standard; it was often/sometimes used as a reference to a non-BIT-sized portion of a 10+ bit "word", even a 4-bit nybble before that became popular)
The 701/703 used CRT electrostatic storage, consisting of 72 Williams tubes with a capacity of 1024 bits each, giving a total memory of 2048 words of 36 bits each.
Adam's unit was probably PART of the internal accumulator and register system. They didn't use "bytes" back then for most mainframe and mini computers. (although 'bytes' quickly and increasingly became 'popular' and implemented)
The term "byte" was coined by Werner Buchholz in June 1956, during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer, which had addressing to the bit and variable field length (VFL) instructions with a byte size encoded in the instruction. It is a deliberate respelling of bite to avoid accidental mutation to bit.
Another origin of byte for bit groups smaller than a machine's word size (and in particular groups of four bits) is on record by Louis G. Dooley, who claimed he coined the term while working with Jules Schwartz and Dick Beeler on an air defense system called SAGE at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in ca. 1956/1957, which was jointly developed by Rand, MIT, and IBM. Later on, Schwartz's language JOVIAL actually used the term, but he recalled vaguely that it was derived from the late 1950s AN/FSQ-31 SAC Data Processing System.
Early computers used a variety of four-bit binary coded decimal (BCD) representations and the six-bit codes for printable graphic patterns common in the U.S. Army and Navy. These representations included alphanumeric characters and special graphical symbols. These sets were expanded in 1963 to seven bits of coding, called the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII). ('ass-key', NOT A-S-C-2) This was usually represented as 7 bits plus parity for error checking, but eventually became full byte-sized extended ASCII.
The development of eight-bit microprocessors in the 1970s popularized this storage size. The term octet is used to unambiguously specify a size of eight bits.
In a VHS/Betamax-like winner-take-all "fight", IBM originally used EBCDIC (ebb-sid-dik), Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code, an eight-bit character encoding used mainly on IBM mainframe and IBM midrange computer operating systems. It descended from the code used with punched cards and the corresponding six bit binary-coded decimal code used with most of IBM's computer peripherals of the late 1950s and early 1960s. ASCII eventually won-out. And now we have Unicode. (UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32, and several other encodings)
(most of this info was gleaned from wikipedia and the InterWebs, intermixed with personal knowledge, memory and experience)
Thank you for the reality check. Next time I complain about storage I will just think about needing the entire Bay area to hold my solid state drive :)
As a computer science student, I'm really glad I stumbled across this video because that is fascinating.. It just makes me so much more grateful for the computer age that I'm in
I have binged some 200+ videos of this playlist and this is one of my favorites.
And to think the first "desktop" like machine I ever booted up required hand-entering 256 bits, followed by the start switch and pressing play on an audio cassette player, to get it started.
Adam Savage just made ball bearings sound interesting. We have a badass here people.
bearings are ecspecially interesting to skaters or anyone who working on bikes or motorcyclces etc.
I hear he's got some real brass ones.
I don’t think I would have jumped in with brass ones but might have gone with very well lubed
1500 cubic kms... and heat like the core of the sun. :)
^This!^ LOL
oh man the exponential growth of technology is a completely amazing thing, love seeing video's like this, makes me feel even more lucky to live in this era.
4:31 the exotic sound of data storage, really bloody gets me in the mood.
One of my first jobs was as a Quality Control inspector at a machine shop that made the armature plates and spacer rings that go between the discs of that huge disc drive. Back in 1982.
My first proper job was 'Computer Operator' on mid range systems, in particular, a DEC VAX Cluster, some 25 years ago. We had 10Gb of storage, in two 5x2 arrays, made up of half gigabyte drives. The drives slid on rails like filing cabinet drawers, and when we had to replace one, it took me and the DEC engineer to lift it onto the rails. Luckily it was at the bottom of the array, I have no idea who we could have replaced any of the top row, above our heads.
I love watching Adam build and talk about things he gets me excited
Back in the day they used to Zero out hard drives with Hammer and Chisel.
I love reading and watching old science fiction and seeing how many things we take for granted that they couldn't even conceive of back then.
im loving this, i just started college for being an electrician and the bits and bytes are what they are teaching our class
The book Adam mentions, The Soul of a New Machine seems to be about a minicomputer by Data General called the Eclipse MV/8000, rather than the 386 which was launched 6 years later by Intel.
+Martin Sidaway Yeah, lots of factual errors here. Lots of flash memory now uses multi-state memory elements, apparently those little units are actually gates rather than memory bits (one reason the supposed byte's tubes are of differing sizes -- it's actually a set of logic gates, not a piece of memory).
+blargg Yes, that is a logic module. The memory in the 704 was core. The logic module with multiple tubes probably isn't 8 bits but rather 5 (or 6) bits performing a particular operation. Back in the day (the 1950's) the 8-bit byte would have been a bit unusual - why do you think we had 7 track tapes (6 data bits and 1 parity). According to the wikipedia, the 704 had 38, 36 and 15 bit registers, so I would guess this is one part of one of the registers.
The single tube is probably a flip flop -- A single bit register.
I read Soul of a New Machine a few decades ago. It was certainly not about 386 but rather a competition with DEC for the burgeoning minicomputer market. The 386 is a relative modern miracle.
The book was about data general trying to get the Nova minicomputer into the market prior to DEC's pdp11 gobblling it all up. It had nothing to 80386 microprocessors.
After watching some other videos from Adam Savage's Man Cave, I thought you were awesome. Now you are well and truly my hero.
I am so glad computer technology came a long way from what they had in the 50s! Thank God for flash storage!
I used to swap out the bearings on 3380's, I absolutely loved doing it.. Hammer, Go-NoGo Gauge, Puller, loads of thick grease and a long screw driver to test the sound vibration after install. I was told the bearings were from Ford transit vans.
The firm i worked for was repairing, testing and selling back to IBM for crushing making way for later machines, AS400.
There was nothing better than a computer room with these drives running, 3phase electrics, Bus n Tag data cables, everything on a giant scale, the processor unit (3300 I think) was twice the size of the HDA unit.
so 1gig in 1985 was the same size as vw beetle engine lol
This really impressed me. I never quite thought that Adam would be into computer stuff like this. The fact that he's knows so much about it is amazing.
The sound of the bearings spinning the platters touched me in very geeky place. It is definitely a sound that harks back to a time when loading levels of a game took 20-40 minutes.
the movie about the enigma code does a great job of illustrating the early origins of the term computer
I know they were holding back on the show. It's awesome to see these guys totally geek out here on Tested :-)
the big hard drive was about 11500 dollars , back in the day, saw a vid on one getting parted out, and correct they ran for years, had amazing shock absorbsion, and was used by banks to hold vital financial info
The hard disk is like Citroen 2cv boxer engine shape.
This just blew my mind. Thanks guys!
it just amazes me how far computing has gone over the years!
The vacuum tube stuff was probably more like a register. The hard disk analog for the vacuum tube era was more like a mercury delay line, storage tube or a magnetic drum.
The thing that jumps to my mind is the cost difference. I am sure that the 1 byte vacuum tube device cost $100's (if not $1000's) which the 1Tb portable hard drive was probably about $100 (or less). That would make the 1 byte device cost AT LEAST $1 trillion in today's dollars. Zounds! Moore's Law on steroids.
Not the size, speed, or energy efficiency?
My first computer was a 386 Suxs (SX) and I think it too had maybe 80Mb. I think I was low side of my 20's. Later I remember vividly thinking how could you fill a Gigabyte?
Well it is 7 years after ya'll published this video and I have a little box on my desk that weighs a little over 2 pounds that holds 8Tb.
That arc is not lost on me.
How long and how far can this kind of growth continue?
I'm so delighted to see Adam's happiness when Will talks about his grandmother. "Did she really?? Awesome!"
Its amazing how far things have progressed in just 60 years, just imagine how it will be in 60 years time!
Impressive, especially the thought the state of things 60 years from now!
Those are resistors, not transistors right? The ones bellow the vacuum tube.
the brown with colored bands? yes.
+Henrik Mørk transistors replaced vacuum tubes so yes, no transistors in there.
I always get excited when Adam says "It gets better" since his talk on obsession I think.
that was the most amazing visualization of moore's law ever
Adam , in the UK the people behind Bletchley Park have been working long and hard to get funding , support and awareness for the work of the Park and its people. It is a place you can now visit and that you can experience and see some of the worlds earliest electronic computers working; please make some time to come explore and talk about them
I thought I was the only one who gets really excited about this kind of stuff.
I feel his collection will not be complete without some "core rope memory". It was used for the Apollo missions. They wove the programming into the cables...amazing stuff.
Would be so cool to somehow travel back in time and show the guys working on these things, a modern PC. Simply to show them what their endless hours of hard work will eventually produce.
I grew up in Schenectady and remember seeing those things in storage at Schenectady high school and in a GE warehouse and having no idea what they were.
Loved this video, thanks guys!
My mind is blown away by this.
In computer history, this is like watching man discover the wheel. Super cool!
Really great video, thank you for creating it 👍
That was amazing , absolutely loved it.....
My friend, Gary Manly ruined his back swapping Gigabytes, and then the twist-lock stacks. I wish he were still alive to see this show.
Great video! History of computing, aw-yeah!!
We understand the difference between RAM and non-volatile storage. I didn't bring a stick of RAM with me, unfortunately, and we wouldn't have filled the whole San Francisco Bay with vacuum tubes if we had compared to modern RAM instead of a hard drive.
I could also argue that Flash memory, which is based on a lithographic process, isn't an entirely unfair comparison. I did have a 256GB SSD with me, which we could have used.
I had a PC teacher who showed us a similar horizontal memory platter. In the oxide there were these huge scratches that made complete circles a few centimeters wide. He said, "This is what happens when a single dust particle get's inside your hard drive in the 1980s".
wow. had no idea about the "bit" thats amazing that it's running on tubes
Oh my goodness. He has a spirited away character in the background. My childhood!
After seeing this i know even more why i am in love with technology.
:)
I recognized the sound of unretracted heads. It makes the hair stand up on my arms.
+Jeffery Rowan Not only that, but they are clearly crashed heads.
AWSOME! I love any story told with smiles and passion. This would make ANY course in school so much better :-)
There were 12 inch wide sets of those stacked disks that you could remove from mainframes and carry around in a plastic carrier. Much smaller but I saw professors carrying those around when I went to college about the time of his gig drive.
Wow, I can totally see making one of those. Awsome video, you should have a show on just your stuff in your collection.
While watching this episode with the 1GB retro disk, I was also downloading a 5.5 GB program, watching a 9 minute video in HD, chatted with friends and played a game.
That gigabyte hard drive is a gorgeous piece of tech. I'd love to have one :)
This is the antiques of the future. I have a 32Kb Magnetic-core memory.
yes I did! I freaked out when he stood it up on th table, and then he placed it on top of the gigabyte and every time it wiggled my heart almost stopped
My 6th grade science teacher had one of those discs from that kind of hard drive, and made us use it as our hall pass. It was so loud if you dropped it.
So it turns out Adam and Will aren't the best Computers. Probably a good thing we have such incredible shrink-ray technology to get all those vacuum tubes into modern hardware, huh?
I remember going to the atari 520st press day when they told the world they were building the 1040 st ,a member of the press lept up and shouted we could never fill that amount of memory !!!!!!!!!
The vacuum tube was used as a kind of transistor, logic gate/ inductor. Semiconductors were only theoretical and perhaps in testing fase at the time.
Every time Adam says "exactly" take a shot. Good luck
I love this episode! I wish you'd make more vids about this "arcane" tech. =P It's rather fascinating to me. :) And today we have more processing power in a phone you have in your pocket than entire IBM of 50's.
Man! This really puts our advancement of technology over time into perspective! For example; if my laptop used the same technology as that Gigabyte device from the 80's, it would by bigger/heavier than my two door car!!! Imagine what we could achieve in the next 30 years!
And now we have 60+TB SSD's being talked about with an expected release within the next 18-24 months
The other question is how much electricity would you need to power a cubic kilometer of the vacuum tube based bytes. The other thing Adam needs is a section of core memory. I remember an add in a BYTE magazine in the 70's or early 80's for a 256k byte memory card for an S-100 bus based machine. The cost? Only a mere $10,000. Now you can buy a single chip with that amount of memory for just a few dollars. Amazing when you look back a bit and realize how much things have changed.
@Tested family: Never allow this video to be deleted! Our children’s children need to see this in 50 years! It will boggle their minds..
"Bendix G15 (ACE) 1947. iT used recirculating tracks on a drum. Each track held more than 100 words.
The ACE was the full scale computer that Turing wished to have built.
It was to have two source switches supplying data to a function box, which, in turn, connected to a destination switch.
The function box had 64 functions including logical, addition/subtraction, shifting, and discrimination."
If I hear one word about the presenter (not Adam Savage of course)as in all the other Tested videos, I will be certain about the complainers lack of interest and appreciation for the topic at hand. This video is two guys geeking our about something that is purely mindblowing, and I am loving it!!!!! can't remember the name of the guy on the right, but I think he is great, enthusiastic and interested.
Minor nitpick: The Tracy Kidder book is about the creation of the Nova series of minicomputers. Way cooler than a 386 ;-)
They would be connected to terminals like the ones that inspired the Severance workstations.
Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller also has an amazing collection I'd love to see.
You know, if you went back in the 70's with that 1 terabyte hardware, they might see you as though you were a god.
Francis Lafontaine. É. If you in 2030 go back to 2015 we will see you as you were a god ;)
It's one thing to hear about it but another thing to actually see it.
"Luddites Try to Comprehend Storage" It's adorable.
I wonder if Adam ever went to The Black Hole in Los Alamos, NM... I should have bought a military grade 1960's centrifuge or a few cryogenic liquid nitrogen canisters when i had the chance.
OMFG, Adam is now a God to me. I love studying the history of digital electronics. One of the most mind boggling crazy piece of old Digital Computer hardware: Mercury Delay Memory Tank. A very early RAM that literary keeps data by slowing down data by transferring with pulses in liquid mercury. WTF
coolest ep yet!!
Its nice to have old equipment.. Its even better to have it run. The oldest equipment I have are a pair of Kaypro II's (CPM, Z80 processor @ 2.2mhz, 64kb ram with 191k floppy drives). I use them with acoustic coupler modems to get on the 'net once in a while.. I remember spending $100 for 10 quad density floppies (I have a quad machine that uses them still).
My Mother used to work at Northern Electric back in the 1950/60's, somewhere in the 1980/90's Northern Electric became Northern Telecom then ultimately Nortel,
My mother used to wire up/solder/assemble Bits and Bites back in the day similar to what Adam had to show off in this video, in fact a hand full of component elements are still sitting in a box some where in her basement to this day.
Maybe I should dig this stuff out and see if there is anything that just might interest Adam or Jamie.
Someone said history was boring? Yeah, I'm not seeing it. This was awesome.
Adam is cool. cheers for sharing
I tried to explain "mores law" to my girl friend, it doesn't register ..... BUT, this is a beautiful example of that, visually... great job!
Moore, Moore's Law.
In 1988 I worked for a company in Tulsa OK that ran DEC mini computers. We had a 6340 (4 processors at 9Mhz IIRC). We bought 8 1GB hard drives and ran them in 'shadow pairs' (2 drive raid) so we had 4GB of disk storage.
The drives were $25,000 each. They were about 6"x12"x12" or about a a half a square foot. So that was $200,000 in hard drives 24 years ago.
2TB drives (just looked) are now $80. For $200K I could buy 5,000TB of HD storage.
I never thought about it till recently but this video right here proves it.. This is what we thought the technological future would be in the 60s, 70s, huge vacuum tube supercomputers. Thats why Ships like the Star Destroyer, Death Star, Enterprise are so HUGE and need such large crews.. Those things are probably mostly computer, gonna need alot of dudes.. swapping out vacuum tubes
A great video. Where can I find a byte for purchase? I'd love to get my son a byte. He's an IT Supervisor it would good on his desk at work.
www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-Tube-Vintage-IBM-Mainframe-700-Series-Pluggable-PU-Module-Pre-System-360-/252566324741?hash=item3ace204605:g:eOsAAOSwzaJX8JjB
in a few years people will be amazed that petabytes are not cheep now.
Will's grandma was one of the very first Computers?? Holy balls, I want to meet her! That would be amazing!
Half a byte is a nibble FACT
and a byte is composed of a high nibble and a low nibble
Has Tested done a video on the history of the byte? I would love to see a history of the technology & devices that innovated storage.
love the spirited away mask of kaonashi in the background