Boman.Biz

Recently I was privileged to have a tour of the inside of Torrens Island Power station, the source of Adelaide’s electricity.  The short version: wow.  I didn’t realise the scale of the operation that goes on quietly 24-hours a day, every day and in the case of ‘B’ station since 1975.  Each ‘A’ and ‘B’ station have a set of four gas fired steam turbines (me standing in front of one above).  The main structure housing the equipment is about 13 stories high with that see-through grid flooring being the norm for most of the walkways – eek!  The people and technology driving it all is impressive.  The people especially, as I was speaking with some of the night staff there I found that it takes 2-3 years to become familiar with all the hundreds of valves, pumps, cooling systems, and control systems it takes to run the place. 

(IBM 701 – circa 1949)

It also surprised me to see the computing systems running the plant, like finding a bunch of Leeds & Northrup and Bailey INFI-90/NET-90 gear still humming along complete with mag-tape drives and connected to a bevy of continuous stationary Facit dot-matrix printers.  Its good to see Magnetic Tape (first introduced in 1949) still going strong in running our critical human needs systems in 2009.  The death of computing like this has been greatly overstated :)