We had Control Data equipment in the Naval Research facility I worked in before I left DC in 1969. There were a number of those punch card machines throughout. Loud is putting it mildly.
Cripes! I just checked eBay and they are getting good money for those punch cards. I have a whole case of them sitting in the garage.....
Yeah, I think I have half a box of them, and if I remember correctly, they are not punched. I may be sitting on a gold mine!!
Maybe we could glue 1970's cents to them and sell as First Day Issues. Smash a couple cents and we would have First Day Issues - Minted Errors!
Many moons ago...while in graduate school I went down to the key punch room and printed up some punch cards with "Have A Merry Christmas And A Happy New Year" and mailed them out. My aunt ran a small department store and when I got home I found out she had stacked it along with the bills she had received!
My laptop has more power now(by far) than the whole room filled banks of 'computers' running the Navy Destroyer I was on way back when. At the time, the ship was the 'latest and greatest' and was considered the best of the best in electronic capability. Then came the CPU in the early 90's and all that went away. Amazing really.
The centerpiece of that computing center where I worked was a CDC Cyber 7600, with a peak speed of 30-odd million floating-point operations per second (MFLOPS), and somewhere between 3 and 4 megabytes of RAM. It didn't take up a whole room, it WAS a room -- it was C-shaped, and the field service guys (who were there full-time) used the area inside it as a closet for their stuff. Compare that to the 512 megabytes of RAM and 400-odd MFLOPS of the Apple... Watch. And not even the current Apple Watch, but the first edition from three years ago. We used to chuckle a bit at Moore's Law (computer power doubles every 24 months, give or take), because if you took it thirty or forty years into the future, it said our whole room full of equipment would fit into the palm of your hand. Chuckle. Chuckle.
Mine was Spruance class. I heard subsequently from a contractor that works for the Navy say that they used the 'old Spruance class' destroyers for target practice. The electronics literally was the whole bottom third of the bottom deck. Crazy, crazy.
Heh. You may appreciate this story. My best friend in college co-oped with a defense contractor. He was an Electrical Engineering major. He wasn't supposed to talk about what he worked on. He used to wear a T-shirt with three identical dancing frogs on the front. His co-workers gave it to him when he left the position. If you asked him about it, and he was drunk enough to let his guard down, he'd explain that it was a "toad array".
My first PC (and yes, it was a PC) was the Commodore VIC-20 with 3.5k of internal memory. We used to say you weren't a real programmer if you can't fit your program in that space.
The company I was working for had a project with Apple to produce a cleaning diskette for their new product, the Apple III which was to do for the business world what the Apple II did for education. Reality set in when IBM destroyed them in the business world. We were left with a LOT of Apple III computers and during a "fire sale" at the company I bought one for $5 including a thermal printer. My two girls used them while they were in elementary school and even turned in reports on the thermal paper!
I still have a couple of my ballistics programs on the computer cards, and wiring for changing settings on the collators.
...by making a machine that was actually manufacturable. The Apple III had a couple of famous design flaws. It was ahead of its time, but in stupid pointless ways, not new and exciting ones.
