Visiting a Data Centre in the 1990s

They sure don’t build “Big Iron” computers like they used to. This is a data centre located in Los Angeles in the 1990s.

Note This article is part of our USA Retrospective series, featuring images captured on an early generation Kodak DC220 digital camera with 1280x1024 resolution. The images have post processed to artificially increase sharpness. Please forgive us if they do not meet your expectations of photographic quality.

Mainframe computers used to be referred to as “Big Iron” because they were big, took up lots of space, and require a special facility to house and operate them. Mainframes used to be a single computer separated into different components, each in a container or rack of it’s own. The central processing unit, disk drives, tape drives, etc.

In the 1990s, as computers became smaller and smaller due to advances in integrated circuit design and manufacturing, Big Iron became more associated with any computer system that was large, and typically these computer systems contain not just one central processing unit, but many microprocessors working together.

I visited a data centre in the 1990s and was allowed to take some pictures with my compact camera. An expert in these systems have identified the machine as a Teradata 3600 with Application Module Processors and hot swappable Customer Replaceable Unit disks. Me? I was just content to watch the blinking lights and scrolling text on displays.

As an indication of how far computing has advanced, a Raspberry Pi 4 (or perhaps several of them to replicate the architecture) would probably have more computing speed these days (though probably not the I/O throughput).

For privacy reasons I am not going to reveal the location of this data centre, so I am marking the location as Los Angeles airport (LAX).