Who would want that old used race car for 14 grand?
1897 Amoskeag steam-powered fire engine of the Boston Fire Department. Weighing 17,000 pounds (7.700 kg). Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Ca. 1919.
Harvard Mark III
Computation Laboratory staff member Ambrose Speiser debugging a test program at the coding box of a stored-program computer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, August 10, 1949. It was professor of applied mathematics Howard Aiken's 3rd computer, named ADEC (Aiken Dahlgren Electronic Calculator), 250× faster than his 1944 Harvard Mark I because it was mostly electronic with some electromechanical parts. Built at Harvard University and delivered to the U.S. Naval Proving Ground, Dahlgren, Virginia, March 1950. It used 5000 vacuum tubes, 1500 crystal diodes, weighed 9.1 t, and had 4,350 words of magnetic drum memory. Using 16 digit BCD encoded numbers, read and processed serially, four bits at a time. Addition time was 4.4 ms, multiplication was 13.2 ms including memory access time. The Mark III used nine magnetic drums! One drum could contain 4,000 instructions of 38 bits read in parallel in 4.4 ms. The arithmetic unit could access two other drums – one contained 150 words of constants and the other contained 200 words of variables. This separation of data and instructions is now known as the Harvard architecture. There were 6 other drums that held a total of 4,000 words of data, but the arithmetic unit couldn't access these drums directly. Data had to be transferred between these drums and the drum the arithmetic unit could access via registers implemented by electromechanical relays. This bottleneck made the access times long 80 ms.
The Mark III, also known as “Bessie” because it mostly computed Bessel functions, had the potential to be a significant entry into the field of computing, but events slowed its completion until competitors finished other markedly superior systems.