I was a bit triggered by the message from
Tom Hunter to wonder, what are the biggest vintage computers which are still in operation in a museum? Or maybe still in use in its original application? Or are fully complete including cooling systems so they could run when fixed? With vintage I mean approximately 25 years and older.
Just wondering
Regards, Roland
Oh well "biggest" is relative. Biggest in terms of speed, or physical size or number of units sold?
As to biggest in terms of speed the CDC 6000 and CYBER series where "supercomputers" in their day (mid to late 60s and early 70s). Later the CRAY computers ruled in terms of raw speed (70s).
John Zabolitzky of cray-cyber.org in Munich/Germany still has a working CDC CYBER 180/960 (
https://cray-cyber.org/systems/cdc-cyber-180-960/) and a CRAY Y-MP EL (
https://cray-cyber.org/systems/cray-y-mp-el/). I haven't talked with John for a while, but I believe his museum is still in existence but stalled due to Covid-19.
The original CDC 6000 and nearly identical CYBER architecture was designed by Seymour Cray and was architecturally amazing for its time (1964). It had a 60 bit CPU for computation, between 10 - 20 Peripheral Processors (PPs) for operating system functions and I/O operating on 12 bit data and with full access to CPU memory, 60 bit words of up to 256K CPU memory which could be accessed in a 16x overlapped fashion. It processed CPU instructions in parallel with multiple functional units using a "scoreboard" to schedule the instructions and delaying instructions if necessary to wait for inputs from previous instructions. It had a 16 word cache - enough to run small loops entirely from the cache. It also implemented what would be now called a RISC type instruction set in both CPU and PPs. These machines where powerful. Add to this raw power an operator console which was driven by a dedicated PP with access to CPU memory which allowed you to monitor and modify operating system data structures like jobs, scheduler and I/O queues, PP assignment, disk activity, tape activity, CPU memory contents etc. The US government labs dealing with nuclear weapons research loved the 6000 and CYBER series machines.
Sorry - I think I got a bit carried away by my enthusiasm for the old CDC CYBER and 6000 series, but they where the highlight of the first 10 years of my career.
Nevertheless I will never own, operate and maintain a CDC CYBER. Apart from availability (zero), the cost of power, air conditioning and maintenance is prohibitive (unless your name is Bill Gates).
Paul Allen's LCM aquired and restored a CDC 6500. Sadly the LCM has gone down the toilet since Paul died and his sister Jody took over and Covid-19 hit. There are not many interested in old mainframes who have the type of resources like Paul Allen. With Paul and all the employees gone the LCM is unlikely to start up again.
Tom Hunter