If you used discrete components how big would it be?

C

Chasing Kate

Guest
If you were limited to only using transistors and other
standard discrete components how big would a typical
home computer be?





--
John

Life is short eat chocolate
 
Chasing Kate wrote:
If you were limited to only using transistors and other
standard discrete components how big would a typical
home computer be?
Click to expand...
Quite voluminous, with lots of cables and metal cabinets
and a heck of a power-bill and airconditioning system.

An example would be an IBM 360

http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/36091.html
http://www.thegalleryofoldiron.com/
http://homepage.virgin.net/roy.longbottom/cpumix.htm
 
Chasing Kate wrote:
If you were limited to only using transistors and other
standard discrete components how big would a typical
home computer be?
Click to expand...
The Pentium 4 alone has 50+ Million transistors, not to mention support
chips. Would you like some memory with that?
You do the math...
Of course the size would depend on what package your discretes are in
and what kind of board and loading you used.
Performance could be a bit sluggish too... :->

Dave :)
 
Chasing Kate wrote:
If you were limited to only using transistors and other
standard discrete components how big would a typical
home computer be?
Click to expand...
Depends. Faced with the necessity to provide a special room solely for
the home computer, most people were sit down and do some serious
thinking about what facilities they really needed and could afford.

My 2c is that 90% of modern computer capacity is wasted and never used.
 
Terry Collins wrote:
Chasing Kate wrote:

If you were limited to only using transistors and other
standard discrete components how big would a typical
home computer be?


Depends. Faced with the necessity to provide a special room solely for
the home computer, most people were sit down and do some serious
thinking about what facilities they really needed and could afford.

My 2c is that 90% of modern computer capacity is wasted and never used.
Click to expand...

Shit, where I work probly only about a quarter of what we have flies
along, the rest labours intensely under the kind of loads we put on it,
and my home PC is just the same, doesn't matter how many times I
upgrade, the resources run dry within 6 months and things start to
slowww down. The problem is it's much easier to write software that
utilises additional processing power/memory/storage space/graphics
capability/etc.etc. than it is to design hardware to cater for it.
 
"Chasing Kate" <sittinginthepool@internode.on.net> wrote in message
news:4244E014.84D015A9@internode.on.net...
If you were limited to only using transistors and other
standard discrete components how big would a typical
home computer be?
Click to expand...
I have 1/2 gigabyte of ram.


thats 4 gigabit. 4000 million bits.

Each bit requires one transistor and one capacitor, and then theres
overhead.

The rest of the system hardly adds many transistors to that.

but 4 billion transistors is going to take a lot of discrete components !
 
"MC" <MC@nonexistant.place> wrote in message
news:d2316a$mat$1@news-01.bur.connect.com.au...
Chasing Kate wrote:
If you were limited to only using transistors and other
standard discrete components how big would a typical home computer be?

Quite voluminous, with lots of cables and metal cabinets
and a heck of a power-bill and airconditioning system.

An example would be an IBM 360

http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/36091.html
http://www.thegalleryofoldiron.com/
http://homepage.virgin.net/roy.longbottom/cpumix.htm
Click to expand...

What the ?? they dont use fully discrete circuits. They use chip ram at
least.
 
But just think of how many jobs board level repairs would create!

David

Fred Ferd wrote:

but 4 billion transistors is going to take a lot of discrete components !
Click to expand...
 
quietguy wrote:
But just think of how many jobs board level repairs would create!

David

Fred Ferd wrote:


but 4 billion transistors is going to take a lot of discrete components !
Click to expand...

You would never get that many boards working at one time, and the
buss speed would be in the KHz range due tho the size of the system.


--
?

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida
 
Hunter1 wrote:
Terry Collins wrote:
Chasing Kate wrote:

If you were limited to only using transistors and other
standard discrete components how big would a typical
home computer be?


Depends. Faced with the necessity to provide a special room solely for
the home computer, most people were sit down and do some serious
thinking about what facilities they really needed and could afford.

My 2c is that 90% of modern computer capacity is wasted and never used.

Shit, where I work probly only about a quarter of what we have flies
along,
Click to expand...
Don't confuse grunt (speed, ram, etc) with facilities (SIO, PIP, USB,
Fire, Midi, etc)

Besides, you might work in Game development or GIS or Video editing,
which I agree are very demanding.
 
Chasing Kate <sittinginthepool@internode.on.net> wrote
in message news:4244E014.84D015A9@internode.on.net...

If you were limited to only using transistors
and other standard discrete components
how big would a typical home computer be?
Click to expand...
Huge. I actually used a couple of minis and mainframes from
the discrete transistor era and the DEC PDP9 was a whole
series of wardrobe sized metal cabinets that you could actually
stand in when you swung out the back door which had the entire
computer proper on postcard sized plug in cards which plugged
in in a huge array that filled the entire back door with the cards
all effectively stacked up vertically. Each postcard sized card
had about 10 transistors on it with most of the cards. And that
was only 8K, nothing like the memory of a modern PC.

The mainframes were physically even bigger,
and werent anything like the horsepower of
a PC or anything like the memory either.
 
Fred Ferd <fred@ferd.com> wrote in message
news:42453e62@news.comindico.com.au...
MC <MC@nonexistant.place> wrote
Chasing Kate wrote

If you were limited to only using transistors and other standard discrete
components how big would a typical home computer be?

Quite voluminous, with lots of cables and metal cabinets
and a heck of a power-bill and airconditioning system.

An example would be an IBM 360

http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/36091.html
http://www.thegalleryofoldiron.com/
http://homepage.virgin.net/roy.longbottom/cpumix.htm

What the ?? they dont use fully discrete circuits. They use chip ram at
least.
Click to expand...
Plenty of the 360s didnt.

And plenty of the older stuff like the 7090 did anyway.
 
Fred Ferd <fred@ferd.com> wrote in message
news:42453ca5$1@news.comindico.com.au...
Chasing Kate <sittinginthepool@internode.on.net> wrote

If you were limited to only using transistors and other
standard discrete components how big would a typical
home computer be?

I have 1/2 gigabyte of ram.

thats 4 gigabit. 4000 million bits.

Each bit requires one transistor and one capacitor, and then theres overhead.
Click to expand...
The discrete transistor computers mostly
didnt do it that way, they used core instead.

The rest of the system hardly adds many transistors to that.

but 4 billion transistors is going to take a lot of discrete components !
Click to expand...
 
On Sat, 26 Mar 2005 10:50:11 GMT, "Fred Ferd" <fred@ferd.com> wrote:

"MC" <MC@nonexistant.place> wrote in message
news:d2316a$mat$1@news-01.bur.connect.com.au...
Chasing Kate wrote:
If you were limited to only using transistors and other
standard discrete components how big would a typical home computer be?

Quite voluminous, with lots of cables and metal cabinets
and a heck of a power-bill and airconditioning system.

An example would be an IBM 360

http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/36091.html
http://www.thegalleryofoldiron.com/
http://homepage.virgin.net/roy.longbottom/cpumix.htm


What the ?? they dont use fully discrete circuits. They use chip ram at
least.

Ferrite toroid core memory was possibly used in that era. These could
Click to expand...
be made into quite small sizes (though massive compared to silicon
RAM). These arrays would be driven by power transistors - though
being arranged in a matrix grid, this would drastically cut the number
or driver transistors that would have been needed.
Still have a board of it here somewhere that I never bothered to chuck
Click to expand...
out.



 
The mainframes were physically even bigger,
and werent anything like the horsepower of
a PC or anything like the memory either.
Click to expand...
I thoughtmy PDP-11 was big.
Apparently the first Cray-1(1976ish i think) did about 80 megaflops/per
second. Apparently an athlon 2800 does around 670megaflops
 
My 2c is that 90% of modern computer capacity is wasted and never used.


Shit, where I work probly only about a quarter of what we have flies
along, the rest labours intensely under the kind of loads we put on it,
Click to expand...
yes but its the unused features of the software that cause bloat.

and these computers may be stalled by the lack of ram, or by slow hard
drives


I dont know how to derive the 90%. That may well be wildly inaccruate. maybe
its 60% or 99%.
 
MC wrote:
Chasing Kate wrote:
If you were limited to only using transistors and other
standard discrete components how big would a typical
home computer be?

Quite voluminous, with lots of cables and metal cabinets
and a heck of a power-bill and airconditioning system.

An example would be an IBM 360

http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/36091.html
http://www.thegalleryofoldiron.com/
http://homepage.virgin.net/roy.longbottom/cpumix.htm
Click to expand...



Fascinating sites thank you
 
"David L. Jones" wrote:
Chasing Kate wrote:
If you were limited to only using transistors and other
standard discrete components how big would a typical
home computer be?

The Pentium 4 alone has 50+ Million transistors, not to mention support
chips. Would you like some memory with that?
You do the math...
Of course the size would depend on what package your discretes are in
and what kind of board and loading you used.
Performance could be a bit sluggish too... :-

Dave :)
Click to expand...


OK for example transistors in the tiny black
plastic they usually come in..... I can well
imagine how big it would be LOL.....

I was asking out of curiosity
 
KLR wrote:
On Sat, 26 Mar 2005 10:50:11 GMT, "Fred Ferd" <fred@ferd.com> wrote:


"MC" <MC@nonexistant.place> wrote in message
news:d2316a$mat$1@news-01.bur.connect.com.au...
Chasing Kate wrote:
If you were limited to only using transistors and other
standard discrete components how big would a typical home computer be?

Quite voluminous, with lots of cables and metal cabinets
and a heck of a power-bill and airconditioning system.

An example would be an IBM 360

http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/36091.html
http://www.thegalleryofoldiron.com/
http://homepage.virgin.net/roy.longbottom/cpumix.htm


What the ?? they dont use fully discrete circuits. They use chip ram at
least.

Ferrite toroid core memory was possibly used in that era. These could
be made into quite small sizes (though massive compared to silicon
RAM). These arrays would be driven by power transistors - though
being arranged in a matrix grid, this would drastically cut the number
or driver transistors that would have been needed.

Still have a board of it here somewhere that I never bothered to chuck
out.
Click to expand...


Is that like a board of tiny donut rings?

I've seen one very briefly at a TAFE way
back in the 80s when I did a computing course.

They were teaching courses in BASIC because
at the time it seemed popular. Around 1982 /83
 
"Chasing Kate" <sittinginthepool@internode.on.net> wrote in message
news:42463C4A.63E24F8E@internode.on.net...
KLR wrote:

On Sat, 26 Mar 2005 10:50:11 GMT, "Fred Ferd" <fred@ferd.com> wrote:


"MC" <MC@nonexistant.place> wrote in message
news:d2316a$mat$1@news-01.bur.connect.com.au...
Chasing Kate wrote:
If you were limited to only using transistors and other
standard discrete components how big would a typical home computer be?

Quite voluminous, with lots of cables and metal cabinets
and a heck of a power-bill and airconditioning system.

An example would be an IBM 360

http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/36091.html
http://www.thegalleryofoldiron.com/
http://homepage.virgin.net/roy.longbottom/cpumix.htm


What the ?? they dont use fully discrete circuits. They use chip ram at
least.

Ferrite toroid core memory was possibly used in that era. These could
be made into quite small sizes (though massive compared to silicon
RAM). These arrays would be driven by power transistors - though
being arranged in a matrix grid, this would drastically cut the number
or driver transistors that would have been needed.

Still have a board of it here somewhere that I never bothered to chuck
out.

Is that like a board of tiny donut rings?
Click to expand...
They werent normally done on a board.

I've seen one very briefly at a TAFE way
back in the 80s when I did a computing course.

They were teaching courses in BASIC because
at the time it seemed popular. Around 1982 /83
Click to expand...
 
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