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How the datacentre developed from the earliest computers to the present day
How the datacentre developed from the earliest computers to the present day
The datacentres that we know today have their origins in the early days of computing when individual computers took up whole rooms.
To manage the security, cooling and power requirements of these enormous machines, specially-designed rooms were developed to house them. These rooms were the first places in which the computer racks, elevated floors and cable trays that are commonplace in modern datacentres were pioneered.
One of the earliest commercial computers was the Universal Automatic Computer 1, or Univac 1, produced initially by Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation and then Remington Rand, after it acquired the company. The first Univac was used by the US Census Bureau in March 1951.
The fifth Univac 1 - originally built for the US Atomic Energy Commission - was used by US broadcaster CBS to predict the correct result of the 1952 presidential election and is shown above with legendary CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite.
Organisations making use of computers had previously been limited to those in academia and government but the Univac made it possible for businesses to take advantage of that computing power. Its arrival helped lay the foundations of business computing, which would lead to the development of mainframes and datacentres in later decades.
Caption by: Tim Ferguson
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