So did you ever wonder? These photographs were taken during the removal of some systems from the old data centre in Newcastle, the equipment being removed is a Pyramid Nile which was a 12 CPU machine (RISC MIPS 4400), these were state of the art machines in their day. As you can see from the photographs, they were stripped of all the boards and drives – then anything that would lighten them so that they could be removed from the computer room. Once the units had been lightened as much as possible, the whole lot was removed from site and put through a shredder – leaving nothing bigger than a ten pence piece.
In actual fact over a period of time there was a lot of equipment scrapped, none of it was sold on – all of it was destroyed. This included the chassis of the machines, the destruction of these machines was quite costly but was essential to ensure the integrity of personal data that had been held on these systems. This doesn’t sound like very much nowadays, but the pile of disk that you can see in one of the gallery shots is almost 20Tb. Now it is actually possible to store that amount of data in a 1″ cube. And given that that sod Moore is still doing his thing, it will probably soon be twice that – if it isn’t already.
This was actually the end of an era, these machines had given sterling service for a number of years – in some cases the manufacturer was afraid of switching them off for maintenance. Examination of the picture of the boards will show that there was more to these systems than the electronics, they were well engineered and manufactured. And in actual fact strange as it is to say, these machines were more than adequate for the task and probably could give an excellent account of themselves today. Of course this is only true if the programers learn to program properly, but as per usual – if it goes slow. Well it’s not my fault would say the programer, as the system made it’s 10,00th read of the same table from disk during the execution of a single query.