HardwareDid you know your gaming PC’s family tree could be traced back to one 1960s nuclear ICBM?When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
HardwareDid you know your gaming PC’s family tree could be traced back to one 1960s nuclear ICBM?When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
The first question that springs from this claim is what the hell does a computer in a missile have to do withdesktopcomputing? The answer, surprisingly, is that computers from the missiles were given to universities and other research institutions, free of charge, at the end of the 1960s.
That was possible because the Minuteman 1 missile was being phased out at that time in favour of the then-new Minuteman 2. And the computers inside these missiles were quite unlike the lumbering, room-filling beasts that typified computing of the time.
Once the missile had been decommissioned, the entire guidance section of the missile body, including the Minuteman D-17b computer, was sent to universities, hence the cylindrical form factor in the image above.
(Image credit: Alexander the ok)
For the record, the Minuteman missile was smaller than you might think, measuring just 17 metres in height and 170 cm across at its widest point. The guidance section of the missile containing the D-17b was 75 cm across and 80 cm high. Bigger than a typical desktop PC, to be sure, but certainly something you could stick on a desk.
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Image1of2(Image credit: Alexander the ok)(Image credit: Alexander the ok)
Image1of2(Image credit: Alexander the ok)(Image credit: Alexander the ok)
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(Image credit: Alexander the ok)(Image credit: Alexander the ok)
(Image credit: Alexander the ok)(Image credit: Alexander the ok)
(Image credit: Alexander the ok)
(Image credit: Alexander the ok)
(Image credit: Alexander the ok)
(Image credit: Alexander the ok)
(Image credit: Alexander the ok)
(Image credit: Alexander the ok)
(Image credit: Alexander the ok)
(Image credit: Alexander the ok)
(Image credit: Alexander the ok)
(Image credit: Alexander the ok)
One board handled clock timing, a whole board provided a single 24-bit register, others for specific logic functions, and so on. The D-17b had a notably low transistor count and relatively high diode and resistor counts.
It turns out that the very notion of a transistor was new back then and reliability concerns dictated the lowest possible number of transistors, around 1,500 in total. That compares with the faintly ludicrous numbers of transistors of modern computers. Even a modest smartphone chip has billions of the things.
Your next machine(Image credit: Future)Best gaming PC: The top pre-built machines.Best gaming laptop: Great devices for mobile gaming.
Your next machine
(Image credit: Future)Best gaming PC: The top pre-built machines.Best gaming laptop: Great devices for mobile gaming.
(Image credit: Future)
Best gaming PC: The top pre-built machines.Best gaming laptop: Great devices for mobile gaming.
The other major component was a magnetic hard drive. The first commercial hard drive was the IBM 350, released just five years prior to the D-17b and weighing in at a full metric tonne. So, the D-17b’s drive was a remarkable achievement of miniaturisation. It’s not clear how much storage the D-17b’s drive offered, but its data storage and recall was critical to the machine’s status as a general purpose computer, and it contributed to an overall architecture that is largely recognisable as a modern computer.
Of course, none of this came cheap. In today’s money the D-17b cost about $2 million a pop, which feels pretty generous when you consider the machines ended up being given away. You can actually still see a D-17b today at the Computer History museum in Mountain View California, while another is on display in a museum in Montana.
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