As Published In
Oracle Magazine
January/February 2013

COMMENT: Time Capsule

  

Time Capsule

  

1946

o13TimeCapsule-ENIAC

Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC)

With more than 17,000 vacuum tubes and 5 million hand-soldered joints, the 1,800-square-foot, 25-ton ENIAC was the first general-purpose digital computer capable of being reprogrammed. The original programmers? All women, six of whom are in the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame.

 

o13TimeCapsule-hal

1968

o13timecapsule-sparc

HAL 9000

Dave: “Open the pod bay doors, HAL.”
HAL: “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Quotes from 2001: A Space Odyssey (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1968)
Keeping our eye on the inevitable. 

 

1987

SPARC Microprocessor

From the “Sunrise” 10MIPS processor to today’s state-of-the-art SPARC T4, the 25-year history of innovation with Oracle’s SPARC microprocessor began when Sun Microsystems developed its own RISC chip.

 

o13TimeCapsule-SunRay1

1999

Sun Ray

Sun Ray clients have no moving parts, no local operating system to manage, and no local storage. The original client, the Sun Ray 1, supported displays up to 1,280 x 1,024 pixels. Now available, Oracle’s Sun Ray 3 Plus Client, supports up to 2,560 x 1,600 resolution for a single display or 5,120 x 1,600 total resolution across two displays, plus high-performance video, audio, and security, while delivering extremely low power consumption.

 

Your First PC


What was your first personal computer? We asked our Facebook fans, and here’s what they said:

Commodore 64 24%
Intel 286 19%
Commodore VIC-20 11%
Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K 8%
Other 38%

2008

Oracle Exadata Database Machine

The original Oracle engineered system, Oracle Exadata is now in its fourth generation. The Exadata Database Machine X3-8 includes 160 CPU cores for database server processing and 168 CPU cores for storage processing.

  

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2012

Destination: SPARC

With the release of the SPARC T4 chip and the Oracle Solaris 11 operating system, which has been optimized for SPARC, Oracle has arrived at better-than-promised application performance and availability.

Your Turn


From the abacus and punch cards to the latest smart phones, the history of computational hardware is rich and varied. Which hardware do you use to run Oracle technology? What’s the one hardware device you can’t live without? Visit Facebook/OracleMagazine and let us know.

    

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