Long obsolete and not just a museum piece, an early massive computer developed 60 years ago remains working, thanks to a technician dedicated to preserving it for future generations.
Tadao Hamada believes that keeping the historic FACOM128B operational will help hand down Japan’s technological heritage to posterity. “I will maintain it forever,” said Hamada, 49.
The importance of the work done by people like Tadao Hamada cannot be understated. A lot of technology from the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s is getting ever more obscure, and as their original designers, maintainers, and users die of old age, we need some way to document their knowledge and pass it on so that we can preserve the technology for posterity.
Hamada went one step further, and actually had to teach himself how the system and its operating system worked, since there was nobody around to teach him. That’s some serious dedication, and I applaud both him, and Fujitsu who set up the project to preserve technology.
Awesome he’s doing that. Wouldn’t want those to be lost to history like how NASA lost their knowledge of building what took and landed astronauts on the moon – those rockets were far simpler than anything made today, but the way they were built – the knowledge, craftmanship, and tooling – have been lost to the annals of time as folks no longer learned the tradecraft necessary and instead focused on college degrees.