TECH: Saw inside Hartford Building

I went inside the Hartford building with a dress shirt, pants and shoes (wore formally first time in years). Inside is this state-of-the-art building with big glass windows, and a operator setting at a desk. She asked me to stare at the webcam to take my photo id or security will throw me out. John (boss) gave me and Pam (from job center) a tour of the Hartford building making my way up the stairs into some employee cubicle room where people look somewhat computer illiterate although they have PCs at every desk.


the server room

We went into his office and talked about what I like, I told him about WITC, what I had no experience with, he saw my resume (and liked it) and list I made. I asked him about multimode fiber, what super computer they have?, what a tape drive looked like?.

Then John punches key buttons to access the super computer and server room. There are a couple Windows workstations with analyzing software called the command center. You step in a sticky mat to get static off your shoes. To the left was the command center having 5 PCs with dual display. To the right and left were 940 MB (without virtual compression) tape archieves as small as a cassette audio tape numbering up to 2000 for just that wall. Then there was another wall with similar 940 MB tape drives. Then you had a wall of bigger tape drives with less HDD space on the right most wall. In the center is a IBM robotic computer where each tape drive around with 4 TB compressed archieves. There was over 200 of those tapes inside. The robotic arm had a digital display showing the number slot it is at and the robot knows where to put back….it’s all automated using a Windows application. He’ll call if I made the job.

The computer had a paper showing in MIPs (million instruction processing / second) that numbered in 100,000. They didn’t tell me how much TB of RAM it had.