Obscure Vintage Computers for $500, Alex

A season 5 episode of Perry Mason from 1961, "The Case of the Meddling Medium," features something called a Clary DE-60 computer, placed into service by Perry and ESP researcher Dr. Andrija Puharich (playing himself) as a random number generator. The Computer History Museum has artifacts and materials associated with the Clary DE-60, but the darn thing looks like a theater prop to me.

This was a very small computer with 18 bit word and 32 words of memory with up to 128 addition words. It was called an electronic computing calculator and was built into a 'beautiful desk.'

Object is a small wooden cabinet (not a desk), on top of which are a typebar typewriter (looks like an IBM Executive but not so labelled) and a 10-key adding machine, both seated in shaped cutouts in the top. The adding machine has a number of pilot lights and function knobs and keys. Inside the cabinet at the rear is a metal frame containing an array of sealed circuit modules, and a bank of PC boards with discrete transistor logic. Inside the cabinet at the front left is a frame for a programming plugboard (no plugboards are in evidence).

The Clary Corporation has kept a low profile since its incorporation in 1940. Its current specialties include products for military and other mission-critical applications. It has no Wikipedia entry. Maybe I've just been reading too much Pynchon recently, but... One never knows, do one?

Faster, cheaper, more durable

Magnetic tape is making a comeback, reports Babbage. It's an important level in the archival storage hierarchy at CERN.

When a tape snaps, it can be spliced back together. The loss is rarely more than a few hundred megabytes—a bagatelle in information-technology circles. When a terabyte hard disk fails, by contrast, the result is usually that all the data on it are lost. The consequence at CERN, specifically, is that a few hundred megabytes of its 100 petabyte tape repository are lost every year. Of the 50 petabytes of data held on hard disk, however, it loses a few hundred terabytes in the same period.

300 TB/yr lost to hard drive failures?!

Vintage

Adding to my brief list of museums dedicated to the history of computing: Austin's Goodwill Computer Museum, which first opened exhibition space in 2005.

Not gawky at all

Arnold Robbins recaps the history of AWK (and its GNU version, gawk), and introduces the new features to be found in version 4.1.

The new implementation [of the extension mechanism] provides the potential for Awk programs to do anything that can be done from C or C++. The simplest example is an extension that provides chdir(), so that Awk programs can finally change their working directory!

Retro

John D. Cook gives us a handy mnemonic for remembering that logs in all bases are proportional to one another.

...a up to x = a up to b down to b up to x.

I swan, every time I have to use this fact (about once a decade), I have to go back and prove it to myself from first principles. Usually takes me an hour.