There's nothing that provides us with a greater reminder of how far
technology has come in the past 50 years than computers.
They started out as room-sized behemoths, barely able to store a
few numbers at a time. They grew to be compact, lightning-fast and
available to nearly every household.
Closely tied to the history of computers is the history of Oak Ridge,
where early on they became an integral part of research here.
In 1953, Oak Ridge National Laboratory received its first computer,
the ORACLE (for Oak Ridge Automated Computer and Logical Engine.)
One of two "homemade" computers, built at Argonne National Laboratory
in Chicago, the ORACLE was so big that portions of the wall had to be
removed to install it in ORNL's 4500 building, which has remained the
stronghold for the lab's main computers ever since.
"At that time, (the ORACLE) was the fastest computer in the world,"
says Betsy Riley, assistant to the director of the Computer Science
and Mathematics Division.
Until the ORACLE arrived, computations had been worked by a math panel
headed up by famed mathematician Alston S. Householder or the researchers
themselves.
A computer held the potential of figuring complex problems in a few
minutes that could take researchers months to solve on their own.
But compared with today's user-friendly machines, the ORACLE was no
quick study.
"There was no compiler at that time," remembers Henry Levy, who came
to the laboratory as a crystallographer in 1943 and became one of the
first to learn how to use the ORACLE. "One had to write in machine
language. You had to learn the language."
"I still remember some of the commands," says Bill Busing, also a
retired crystallographer who arrived at ORNL in 1954 and learned the
ropes of the ORACLE from Levy. "I believe two, four was clear and add
... Two, two was subtract ... ."
One step up from having to write directly in binary code, researchers
would punch out the programs -- combinations of numbers and the letters
A through F -- onto paper tape and submit them to the ORACLE operator
at their assigned time slots -- which could land in the middle of the night.
The ORACLE contained a five kilobyte memory -- or 1/200th of a megabyte,
says Busing.
"And you may have 100 megabytes on that machine over there," he says,
gesturing to a modern PC sitting on the other side of the room.
"One of the early programs I wrote had about 100 words. That's about
500 bytes in the program itself," says Busing. "And you loaded that
in the memory and hoped the space would be enough to store temporary
numbers and things like that. Pretty simplistic, huh?"
"Times have changed, haven't they," says Levy.
Indeed they have.
In April, a new supercomputer about the size of a tall stereo cabinet
was delivered to the lab to replace nearly 10 generations of computers
that have come and gone since the ORACLE.
When upgrades on the IBM RS/6000 SP are complete, it will operate at
one teraflop of speed -- that's a trillion calculations per second --
and have over 300 gigabytes of memory. A gigabyte is about a thousand
megabytes.
All this is made possible by the gigantic leaps in technology that
have characterized computing since it first began.
The development of the network, the microprocessor, the Internet and
parallel processing have brought about more ways to use the computer
than anyone could have ever imagined in the beginning.
"The chairman and CEO of IBM in the (19)50s, Tom Watson, is famous
for a statement he made to the world after IBM produced one of its
first big machines," says Ron Leinius, a retired computer scientist
who oversaw the computer program at all three local Department of
Energy sites.
"He said that they had carefully calculated the need for computation
in the United States, and they figured six or seven computers would be
required before saturation."
"This is really a very interesting point," says Busing, "because what
it really illustrates is how poor human beings' imagination is."
We've come a long way, baby.
