Celebrating 50 Years of Malaysian Independence with Technology!
In celebration of Malaysia’s 50th year of independence, we not only want to point our a cool corner badge widget that has been put together by the creative folk over at Widget Pi that is in honour of Merdeka Day.
The widget can be seen in use at FT Car Rental, and can be downloaded (or at least copy and pasted) from Widget Pi.
In addition to that, there is also a nice article from TechCentral that celebrates in a different way by talking about Malaysia’s first ever computer mainframe, the gigantic 8 Kilobyte beast that filled an entire room!
In 50 years of independence the nation has seen many milestones. Among them is the installation of the National Electricity Board’s mainframe computer 42 years ago. The board, now known as Tenaga Nasional Bhd, was the first government department to go high-tech with a computer system.
It was 1965 and the mainframe occupied a room at the NEB headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, which had just been opened by the then Prime Minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman.
Huge as it was, the IBM 1440 only had a storage capacity of 8 kilobytes. In comparison, a desktop personal computer of this era has a storage capacity of 320 gigabytes – roughly 40 million times that of the mainframe. Also, the mainframe had cost the princely sum of RM700,000, while the more modern and more powerful PC would set you back about RM3,000 today.
It was such a novelty that a group of about 1,000 NEB employees and government officials came to see it being unveiled, and were treated to a tour of the electronic data processing (EDP) section of the building.
TNB is currently using IBM’s P-series servers which offer up to 32 gigabytes of storage capacity, which can be easily increased when needed. Its investment in information technology has also grown since the days of the IBM 1440, and now amounts to RM2mil annually. One result is the meter reader who can print out your electricity bill immediately.
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