If you saw the film Hidden Figures, you saw a great story about genius vs. perseverance and racism in the early days of the Space Race with—you guessed it!—Russia. The story followed the careers of three people, three black women, that were so mathematically gifted that they served as human “computers.” But a dozen of them were set to be replaced with an IBM computer advertised to do a dazzling 17,000 calculations a second. Today we would rate it at 17 KHZ, whereas modern day processors are measured in billions of operations per second or GHZ. And now, one of those ancient behemoths has turned up in an unlikely place:
NASA told the family of the deceased that it was not in the junk removal business. “No, we do not need the computers,” NASA told the family of the deceased. “We have no use for [them].” The report drily notes, “The computers were not removed from the residence due to their size and weight.”
Indeed, the computer in question likely hails from the mid to late ‘60s, which would put it in the same generation as the earlier versions of Big Blue’s highly successful System/360 series. These computers were painfully slow by today’s standards, they took up a whole room and damn near needed their own mini power station and cooling system just to run.
Why anyone would take one home is a mystery, perhaps part of the answer is simple nostalgia, maybe mixed with a little bit of pride. No doubt there’s probably a really neat story here. But we’ll never know the details: the device, along with other space exploration related materials, was found in the basement of a retired NASA engineer who passed away.