MIT Cloud Computing Video 1963: We Have Come A Long Way Haven't We?
This is MIT circa 1963. Watch this 30 minute film from the "MIT Science Reporter" to see how early mainframe computers have some resemblance to how we think about cloud computing systems today, nearly 47 years later. No doubt we have come along way, yet some of the same core principles described in 1963 are still relevant in 2010.
A few highlights at these time codes:
- :35 - Program host introduces the topic of "time sharing" where 100's of simultaneous users can be supported. This was "revolutionary" for 1963.
- 1:20 - Computer scientists are creating solutions to computer processing bottlenecks.
- 2:00 - 10 years earlier (1953) computers were not reliable and difficult to work with.
- 3:20 - "The man / machine interaction is very poor"
- 5:50 - Scientists hoping to support 5, then 20 and possibly 30 connected terminals to one mainframe.
- 10:00 - Experimenting with a "supervisor" function to support the first timesharing architectures devised at MIT. The supervisor distributes the work to a single processing thread. (The "supervisor" sounds like the Sonian ESB that distributes processing jobs to waiting CPU's)
- 12:30 - Discussion turns to a new type of magnetic storage: "the spinning magnetic disk" that can hold 9 million "words" of information. (For comparison the main CPU can handle 65,000 "words".) The magnetic disk is critical to supporting timesharing.
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