1958 FACOM 128B Japanese Relay Computer, still working!

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And still controls the grid for Tepco.

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 59 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/BunRabbit πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Dec 01 2019 πŸ—«︎ replies

Can it run Crysis?

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 16 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/Domspun πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Dec 01 2019 πŸ—«︎ replies

Don't several of these super old computers still work (globally I mean)? Talk about planned obsolescence...

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 10 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/natori_umi πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Dec 01 2019 πŸ—«︎ replies

[removed]

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 17 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/[deleted] πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Dec 01 2019 πŸ—«︎ replies

What is that strip with the dots called ?

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 4 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/lllllll______lllllll πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Dec 01 2019 πŸ—«︎ replies

I want one. Perfect toy.

Go looking for that one relay that's broken somewhere in there makes for a happy few weeks of joy and excitement, oh yeah!

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 6 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/ben_howler πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Dec 01 2019 πŸ—«︎ replies

Legend says they even have working FAX

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 7 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/[deleted] πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Dec 01 2019 πŸ—«︎ replies

I want to go back and see this.

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 3 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/Zcypot πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Dec 01 2019 πŸ—«︎ replies

NGL, this makes me appreciate what I learned in Numerical Methods way back then. I'm wondering if it's open to the public. I want to see it in person so badly!

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 2 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/macthecat22 πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Dec 03 2019 πŸ—«︎ replies
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Hello and welcome to Japan, the land of a thousand shrines, which exudes a fascinating combination of tradition and modernity. The land of advanced technology that gave us such electronic wonders as the handheld electronic calculator, the Walkman, the LCD electronic watch, the confusing train ticket machine, the incredible ticket gate machine, the cute but somewhat useless robots, and not to forget the super complicated computerized toilet and the dancing plastic food displays. So Japan seems to be at the forefront when it comes to electronic gizmos. But it was not always the case. Today, I have been invited to take a look at one of Japan's earliest commercial computers, the FACOM 128B. A machine developed by Fujitsu in 1958. Amazingly enough it's not based on transistors, not even tubes, but on relays. And even more amazingly it still works as of today. But wait, did I just say relay computer, in 1958? What gives? Even for the time, making a relay computer seems completely anachronistic. This is a whole 15 years after the ENIAC, considered to be one of the first tube based digital computers, developed in the 1940s. In this timeline it appears sandwiched between the IBM 650 and the IBM 709, two large and rather evolved tube based machines. And our IBM 1401, introduced in 1959 would already feature a fully transistorized design. The era of relay computers was contemporary to the Eniac. George Stibitz at Bell Labs was the first one to realize that the same relays used in telephone installations could be used to build computers built on the binary principle. He demonstrated the first relay based computer in 1939. It was quickly followed by larger and larger models for the military. The Bell Labs machine II, which already includes floating-point hardware, dates from 1943. Meanwhile in Germany computer pioneer Konrad Zuse demonstrated the relay based Zuse 3 as early as 1941 and the Zuse 4 in 1944. Then a generation of immense relay behemoths were built to support the war effort, including the Bell Labs models 3, 4 and 5. But most famous is the 1944 Harvard Mark 1, although its main calculating elements are electromechanical counters, not relays. You can still see a portion of the Harvard Mark I in Boston. The 1947 Harvard Mark II was equally gigantic, and replaced the counters with relays, making it a proper relay computer and much faster. Finally one of my favorite has got to be the space age looking IBM Selectively Sequence Electronic Calculator, which uses a combination of tubes and some 20,000 relays. But of course the ENIAC showed to the skeptics that a viable tube based computer could work at least 100 times faster, and the rest was history. The electronic tubes took over, and relay computers were quickly forgotten. After the disastrous end of the war, the battered Japanese nation was in the process of rebuilding and eager to retrace the early steps of computing. A small-scale replica of the ENIAC logic was demonstrated at the Osaka University in 1950, followed by a larger machine using the EDSAC instruction set Meanwhile, ETL a famed research lab funded by the powerful MITI government agency, designed a huge relay computer with 20,000 relays, this time taking aim at the Harvard Mark II. Fujitsu at the time the Fuji Tsushinki Manufacturing Company, was the leading Japanese provider of relay based telephone equipment. It was contracted to build a huge relay computer from MITI. Following this MITI sponsored effort, Dr. Toshio Ikeda, who would later rise all the way to become the managing director of the entire Fujitsu company, decided to design a commercially viable relay computer. He called it the Fuji Automatic Computer, or FACOM 100. An improved revision the 128A was developed in 1956, and the final design iteration was the 128B in 1958 So it had taken a long time but the FACOM 128 was Japan's first realay computer that was not merely a laboratory demonstration, but a true commercial product. I took advantage of a recent vacation in Japan to see it firsthand. I dragged my wife along, but fortunately the Shinkansen rides are always a treat. That's how we ended up at the foot of Mount Fuji, in Numazu, where everything is Mount Fuji themed, including your foldable chopstick holder Numazu is the site of the Fujitsu factory that used to produce the firm's famous Japanese IBM-compatible mainframes This FACOM 128B was built in 1959. Our visit was hosted by Mr. Yoshio Takahashi who facilitated the translation. English was a bit choppy, and my Japanese is non-existent, so I will mostly do a voice-over for the rest of this video This particular machine comes from the Nihon University in Tokyo, Japan's largest University, where it remained in service for 15 years. And we all need to give a hand to this shy gentleman Mr. Tadao Hamada, the lead restorer and the hero of this restoration effort. This machine was predominantly used for scientific calculations. Mr. Takahashi explains that it was used at the university for the design of this Japanese turboprop plane, to model the flight effects of losing one engine. It's done with relays, lots and lots of relays. Mr. Hamada gives us a quick orientation of the main elements. The CPU is contained in the racks in front of us, we'll see how the memory is hidden behind in a minute. It has a very impressive central console. It is also well endowed with multiple tape readers and punchers with a very large bit width. The tapes are used for both programming and data. The 128B also has banks of read-only memory. The read only memory is simply implemented with peg contacts and perforated cards. It is primarily intended for special function look-up tables and subroutines. The system is completed by an output printer. As you'll see its principle of operation is directly inspired from the older IBM moving bar printers found in the early tabulating machines, but it prints impressively crisps outputs. And it's on! Okay, we're on. I believe the first demonstration is going to be three plus three. Now as you can tell it's not entirely obvious how you would do such a simple thing faced with this sea of buttons and lights. Well the first try did not work quite as expected, which gives us a chance to admire the pale blue front panel. The left keypad is used to input numbers. Numbers are floating-point, with 8 digits in the mantissa and 2 in the exponent. The exponent varies from minus 19 to plus 19, so the machine is more like a programmable scientific calculator running natively in floating-point, Like most of the relay machines of the time. We'll discuss later how single digits are represented in binary using seven bits, while sign is two bits, leading to very wide word size of 69 bits, also typical of relay machines of the time. The right panel is for the instructions. It starts with 3 memory addresses fields of three-digit each, 2 for the operand and 1 for the result. The two first address fields go from 0 to 299 and the third address is from 0 to 199. Now, on the right of the keyboard, is the opcode part of the instruction. All set and done, I count about 70 bit of width give or take a few. How many bits? 72 bits for instruction. 72 bits per instruction? Wow, that's a lot of bits. Ok, this was just an opcode error. We are all sorted out. We are about to do 3 plus 3, watch closely 3 plus 3. Let's see how to decipher the result of the blinkenlight panel. Once again, the bones of the machine show through. We easily recognize our 8 digit mantissa and 2 digit exponent, but the digits are displayed in a peculiar way. This is due to the internal bi-quinary representation. Each digit is encoded using 7 bits like so: there are five bits encoding the quinary part, 0 to 4, and 2 bits encoding the binary part, 0 or 5. The result is obtained by summing the quinary and the binary parts. In our case bit 5 is on and bit 1 is on So this is 5 plus 1: this is a 6 The main advantage of bi-quinary is the ease of error checking. Note that always one, and only one bit has to be present in the binary and quinary part of the coding. It is very easy to find a relay that has stuck or not made contact, in which case either zero or two or more bits will be set in a section. Since temporary contact problems are frequent in relays, bi-quinary encoding was well worth the extra coding bits, and an accepted standard and coding scheme, ever since the Bell Labs II relay machine. Takahashi-san is showing us the rack responsible for addition and subtraction This rack is the hardware for multiply, divide and square root. These earlier relay machines are really deceptive most of them had advanced floating-point hardware and are much more capable than you'd think So that's two. There you go: one point four one four. Yes, that's it! Impressive. Can you do it you do it again? And here you go: about one second for a square root It's not that bad actually, about what a pocket calculator from the late 1970s would do. Clunk. Two seconds. Very impressive. But there is more hidden behind the first row of racks past the power supply. This is where the many memory racks hide Oh that's awesome. You can see the crossbars on it. The memory implementation is another example of reusing electromechanical switching components of the time. These units are actually telephone crossbar switches. Originally crossbars were just that: two alignments of contact bars crossing each other in the matrix arrangement. In order to connect an input to an output, the telephone operator would just insert a peg at the intersection of the bars, and establish the telephone circuit between the caller and the receiver, for the duration of the call. The invention of the automated crossbar in the 1930s was a major telephone switch advancement, a co-invention of Swedish and Bell Labs engineers. A crossbar switch could establish the contact using an electromagnet to actuate the bars, then capture the contact for the duration of the call. One more relay would release the contact at the end of the call. Essentially the crossbar is an electro-mechanical matrix memory The FACOM 128B has 180 words of memory. Assuming a 69 bit width, that would be about thirteen thousand bits. Thirteen thousand bits! The memory takes a huge amount of space hidden at the back of the machine. There are two rows of memory cabinets, and each row has crossbars both in the front and in the back of the rack. Wow! And this brings us to the power supply. There are two cabinets: the functional one here is actually a very well done modern reproduction, while you can see the original decommissioned one just behind. The machine is pulling 30 amps at 80 volts, so about 2.4 kilowatts. This was much less than I expected. Our transistorized IBM 1401 is about 12 kilowatts. To put it in perspective, a single modern 19-inch rack from a Google or Facebook installation would be in the 25 kilowatt range. It's a reproduction of the original. Here you have the older style switches. That means 1960. Where can you read that? Oh okay, you have to be good in Japanese! Okay, we were just warming up. Now we are going to solve a realistic math problem: a set of five linear equations. This will involve the inversion of a five by five matrix. To program the machine we have the trusty paper tape. And it's not eight bits. This problem requires running a program loop, which in our case is an actual perforated tape loop. The tape is 36 bits wide, so an instruction takes two rows of perforated tape. One paper tape is used for the program and the second one is used to input the data. All right, I hope everyone is ready for the big matrix inversion, here we go! Holy Molly! I didn't expect the calculation to take so long. I kept it almost in its entirety, but you will be forgiven if you skip ahead two minutes to the end result. So right now it's inverting the matrix, doing matrix inversion? It's solving the problem using matrix inversion I suppose, calculating very hard. It's hard to film, everything's moving at the same time! Hey, done. [Hamada-san] Input data. And the answer is down there. [Takahahsi-san] This uses the answer to do the same calculation and find the difference. Oh, that's the error. That's the remaining error on the matrix inversion, I get it. Congratulations! But what do you do when something goes wrong. Hamada-san tells me it does not happen too often. Regular maintenance is only every three month on average with the machine being demoed almost every day. They change out only one relay a year. The wiring technique is exactly similar to the one used in Fujitsu's contemporary telephone installations. Notice that no connectors are used for the relays. Wires are soldered directly to the leads which makes it quite challenging to swap out a relay. I also like that they had preserved the original maintenance toolkit that came with the machine. There would be just one successor to the FACOM 128B, a scaled down model 138, and this was the end of the relay computer story. But this was not the end of the FACOM line, quite the contrary, but rather the beginning. Collaborating with former IBM famed designer Gene Amdhal, Fujitsu would go on to release a successful series of IBM compatible computers under the FACOM name, that not only were compatible but also looked very much like their IBM brethren. Eventually Fujitsu would emerge as Japan's computer powerhouse and build some of the fastest computers in the world. What to treat though to witness the first heroic steps of computer engineering so well preserved. I hope you have enjoyed this marvelous machine as much as I did. Many thanks to my hosts Takahashi and Hamada-san and also to Samtec and Fujitsu that let me spend some geek time with no intention to bring back any business whatsoever. Tsayonara!
Info
Channel: CuriousMarc
Views: 1,055,145
Rating: 4.9240203 out of 5
Keywords: CuriousMarc, Relay Computer, Vintage Computing, Retro Computing, Japan, Fujitsu, FACOM, 128B, Relay, Toshio Ikeda, Crossbar Switch, Harvard Mark I, Bell Labs Model I, IBM SSEC
Id: _j544ELauus
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 24min 5sec (1445 seconds)
Published: Thu Nov 28 2019
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