A brief history of technology - when computers were the size of rooms

Technology may be advancing and improving at a fearsome rate, but few developments today can match the design, charm and sheer weirdness of the inventions of yesteryear

Today we can interact with technology in myriad ways. We can talk to it, swipe its screen, or just gesture near it. We can strap it to our heads and be transported to new, virtual worlds.

Or we can just find new things to play Doom on.

The point is that today we're hugely spoilt in terms of the choices and power that technology gives us.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that everything's got better (just ask the polar bears).

Just because the computers of the '40s, '50s and '60s were a tad on the slow side compared with the latest iPhone doesn't mean they aren't beautiful, or that they shouldn't be remembered and cherished.

So, for those reasons, Computing brings you a gallery of ancient machines.

First we have Faith Lillibridge at the NORC console. The picture, we're told, shows Faith on the fifth floor of Columbia University Watson Lab in New York in 1954. This beautiful contraption cost $250,000 in 1952.

A brief history of technology - when computers were the size of rooms

Technology may be advancing and improving at a fearsome rate, but few developments today can match the design, charm and sheer weirdness of the inventions of yesteryear

Here we see the wonderfully named Whirlwind 1 from 1950. It was the first computer capable of making real-time calculations. It could add two 16-bit numbers in two microseconds and multiply them in 20 microseconds. Aptly named, then.

A brief history of technology - when computers were the size of rooms

Technology may be advancing and improving at a fearsome rate, but few developments today can match the design, charm and sheer weirdness of the inventions of yesteryear

For the valve enthusiasts among you, we present the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator II. It was the first computer to have a microprogrammed control unit and a bit slice hardware architecture. A unit can be seen at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge.

A brief history of technology - when computers were the size of rooms

Technology may be advancing and improving at a fearsome rate, but few developments today can match the design, charm and sheer weirdness of the inventions of yesteryear

Here, an IBM storage device boasting a whopping 5Mb of space is being loaded onto a plane while a group of onlookers wonders where anyone will possibly find enough data to fill it. And how they're going to get it off the plane again.

A brief history of technology - when computers were the size of rooms

Technology may be advancing and improving at a fearsome rate, but few developments today can match the design, charm and sheer weirdness of the inventions of yesteryear

The Weizmann Automatic Calculator at the Weizmann Institute in Israel in the 1950s. It was the first computer in Israel, and one of the first large-scale, stored-program electronic computers in the world at the time.

A brief history of technology - when computers were the size of rooms

Technology may be advancing and improving at a fearsome rate, but few developments today can match the design, charm and sheer weirdness of the inventions of yesteryear

Strangely not a prop from Fritz Lang's Metropolis but the Tide-Predicting Machine number 2, better known as Old Brass Brains.

The US Coast and Geodetic Survey put this vision of metallic beauty into service in 1910. It was used until 1965, when it was replaced by a probably far uglier electronic computer. For shame.

A brief history of technology - when computers were the size of rooms

Technology may be advancing and improving at a fearsome rate, but few developments today can match the design, charm and sheer weirdness of the inventions of yesteryear

These two oddly peturbed-looking gentlemen are overseeing the dismantling of the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer in 1964. At this point it had been in operation for 15 years.

A brief history of technology - when computers were the size of rooms

Technology may be advancing and improving at a fearsome rate, but few developments today can match the design, charm and sheer weirdness of the inventions of yesteryear

Possibly our favourite photo of all time, here we see the first Elliott 405 computer (electronic, no less) being delivered to Norwich City Council in 1957. It took two months to install and test, after which it was ceremoniously demonstrated for the mayor. We like to think it did a BSOD for him.

A brief history of technology - when computers were the size of rooms

Technology may be advancing and improving at a fearsome rate, but few developments today can match the design, charm and sheer weirdness of the inventions of yesteryear

A Bell Relay Computer showing racks in which the computing, storing and controlling relays were mounted. This unit was used by the US Army.

In this era organisations were so proud of their enormous investments that the computers were often housed centrally, in glass rooms.

A brief history of technology - when computers were the size of rooms

Technology may be advancing and improving at a fearsome rate, but few developments today can match the design, charm and sheer weirdness of the inventions of yesteryear

This is the Control Data Corporation 1604 electronic computer used by the applied mathematics department of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

Memory in the 1604 consisted of 32K 48-bit words of magnetic core memory with a cycle time of 6.4 microseconds. It was set up as two banks of 16K words each, with odd addresses in one bank and even addresses in the other.

The two banks were phased 3.2 microseconds apart, so average effective memory access time was 4.8 microseconds. The computer executed about 100,000 operations per second.

It also made your office look like the Batcave from the original TV series. Pow!