Ancient history and heavy metal

[Ozzard]

(Transferred from an incidental discussion in http://www.hhplace.org/discuss/hellos_goodbyes_introductions/7060-hi_folks.html where a couple of folks were talking about old computer technology. This is about the technology. If you're not interested in folks sitting round doing The Four Yorkshiremen impressions with regard to computers, you probably don't want to read the rest of it :-) )

Despite being a relative youngster, I wrote my first program by punching chads out of punched cards. By hand - none of these typewriter-style punches! I've toggled the boot code into a mainframe via the front panel, have helped to tune the memory access speed of core store (we got 10% out of it before we started getting errors and had to back off - overclocking in the 1960s!) and have dragged several hundredweight of kit up the ramp into the machine room. In trainers - wouldn't fancy doing that in heels!

Ahhh, memories... :-)

[Guy N. Heels]

(Transferred from an incidental discussion in http://www.hhplace.org/discuss/hellos_goodbyes_introductions/7060-hi_folks.html where a couple of folks were talking about old computer technology. This is about the technology. If you're not interested in folks sitting round doing The Four Yorkshiremen impressions with regard to computers, you probably don't want to read the rest of it :-) )

Despite being a relative youngster, I wrote my first program by punching chads out of punched cards. By hand - none of these typewriter-style punches! I've toggled the boot code into a mainframe via the front panel, have helped to tune the memory access speed of core store (we got 10% out of it before we started getting errors and had to back off - overclocking in the 1960s!) and have dragged several hundredweight of kit up the ramp into the machine room. In trainers - wouldn't fancy doing that in heels!

Ahhh, memories... :-)

AHH yes, the 8" (bedsheet) size floppies, 10 platter disks. BTW I still have a 10 platter cat-eye alignment disk in my basement if anyone has a crying need for one.

And lessee, how about a paper punchtape reader to load in a loader so you could boot-up (I think IBM still calls it IPL).

Oh, I almost forgot about the memory cards - we had the real thing in those days. It was called core and after it was loaded you could pull it outta the computer and cart it across town if you liked. I kept one loaded page on the shelf just in case everything went to hell in a handbasket. What a way to go!

[Dr. Shoe]

Ah yes the memories! Accidently shortcircuiting the master CPU with the cabinet and frying about £50,000 worth of electronics, still a lot of money in 1982. Programming in FORTRAN, using B2DEC commands to get anything at all to appear on the VDU, EEPROM blowing and having all sorts of fun with upside down displays and transposed keys.

[Guy N. Heels]

Ah yes the memories! Accidently shortcircuiting the master CPU with the cabinet and frying about £50,000 worth of electronics, still a lot of money in 1982. Programming in FORTRAN, using B2DEC commands to get anything at all to appear on the VDU, EEPROM blowing and having all sorts of fun with upside down displays and transposed keys.

FORTRAN! Now there's a language, not quite as colorful as Klingon, but a bit more responsive. I also used the Datapoint equivilent called Databus. After all, Fortran was really designed for use on a 64 bit system and was not much use on an 8 bit system. Speaking of which - how about speaking in OCTAL! That was mostly what they used on the military fire-control CPU's.

[chris100575]

Pah, I thought this thread was about music. Chris

[Dawn HH]

What the HECK are you all talking about? I was just a lowly KEYPUNCH OPERATOR back in the 60's & 70's at a steel company in our area. Now you want to read a STORY - well here goes. We had one of those machines, (don't know the name or "mystery" code of it), but it calculated the hours & rate of the men in the mill for their pay checks, (I think). Anyway our guys left the front cover off the machine all the time, (who knows why), but we could see the mechanics of the machine operating. There was a rod/bar that moved in & out of the front of this "contraption", I think, to move the cards along - you can tell I'm real technical in my explanation!!! However, here comes the GOOOOOOOD PART. I had a co-worker that was deathly AFRAID of SNAKES - are you getting the message yet? So, one day at lunch-time, myself & a friend decided to insert one of those ugly rubber snakes around said moving rod, hoping to scare the "BEJABBERS" out of her as the rod moved in & out as she was retrieving the payroll cards. As usual as BRAIN DEAD workers go, we forgot about it & went home at quitting time. Now the payroll supervisor from the mill was staying by himself to finish up the last of the payroll & GUESS WHO FOUND THE SNAKE? Not my friend. Needless to say the next day I almost lost my job after my boss stopped laughing to "YELL" at me. Story goes, the supervisor from the mill NEEDED A CHANGE OF GUCHIES. So there, top this one. TEE! HEE! TOOTLES!!! Mickey68

[Dawn HH]

In case you new members don't know, Mickey68 is my wife and she is just as "squirrelly" today as back then. Wasn't that just about the time I met and began dating you, Dear??? TEE! HEE! Cheers--- Dawn HH

[jmc]

What the HECK are you all talking about? . . .

Those great big room-filling computers from the days before PC's. The ones that consumed so much power that they could heat an entire building. They were officially called "mainframes" back in their day, unofficially called "big iron" and a plethora of other somewhat more derogatory names.

They had six-figure price tags, whopping power requirements, occupied enormous amounts of space and your average desktop PC from Wal-Mart could out-perform one of them any day!

The designs of our modern PC's grew out of mainframe designs and most of the jargon used by computer engineers and programmers today (geeks) has its roots with these machines.

[Guy N. Heels]

Those great big room-filling computers from the days before PC's. The ones that consumed so much power that they could heat an entire building. They were officially called "mainframes" back in their day, unofficially called "big iron" and a plethora of other somewhat more derogatory names.

They had six-figure price tags, whopping power requirements, occupied enormous amounts of space and your average desktop PC from Wal-Mart could out-perform one of them any day!

The designs of our modern PC's grew out of mainframe designs and most of the jargon used by computer engineers and programmers today (geeks) has its roots with these machines.

Well, almost. IBM, also known as Big Blue, employed a 64 bit word for their 360 & 370 series, and that was just on the bus line without even counting the tag lines. As far as I know, no PC today uses a full 64 bit word.

Now I'll grant you that the speed of a modern Pentium processor will run rings around one of those old monstrocities, and so there probably isn't much need for a genuine 64 bit word. Besides, I know that some PC's do use a 32 bit structure, which is actually a half word. So with the speed of the Pentiums, the new stuff is really stepping right along and you don't need ConEd to power the sucker or Niagra falls to cool it either.

But the PC's still can't replace the Crays; and you'll never again be able to pull the memory out and cart it across town and have it go to work. On the other hand, we now have memory sticks that'll hold more than the total core capacity of some of those really big old mainframes.

[Ozzard]

The total core capacity... yes. My father was involved in designing some of the early 1970s mainframes for ICL. The 2900 series had a maximum addressible memory of 4 Mwords (12 Mbytes, I *think* - will ask). Why? Because if you put the memory around the CPU on 50 foot cables, on 3 floors, with the best aircon you could install, that was as much as you could fit before the cooling gave up the ghost. Now a typical mobile phone has 32 Mbytes (10 Mwords at that word size) of RAM, with a massively faster cycle time. We couldn't take cores out of the mainframe I worked with - they were oil-cooled, for speed.

[Guy N. Heels]

OIL COOLED?!? Man that's a new one on me! But yes, the heat being generated was a real problem because much of that stuff was transitor logic and the linear power supplies alone generated huge quantities of heat. I can remember trying to install the equivilent of a 2703 in a computer room in Atlanta one August. I expect I really looked odd going to work with a top coat, but there was an 80 ton air conditioner just 3 feet from where I was working. It was enough to give you frostbite.

[Tom-NL]

Sounds you like you guys (only one gal posted in this thread ...) might enjoy subscribing to the Usenet group alt.folklore.computers

[Guy N. Heels]

Sounds you like you guys (only one gal posted in this thread ...) might enjoy subscribing to the Usenet group alt.folklore.computers

I dunno; do they need any 5 1/4" floppies or a 10 platter cat-eye alignment pack?

[Ozzard]

Yes, oil-cooled. As one of his many maintenance jobs, my father wrote test code to exercise different parts of the system - and got rounded on by the hardware designers for writing code that continually flipped one word of memory to test the oil cooling. "It's not designed to take that - the cores will overheat!" I'll look at alt.folklore.computers - hadn't seen that. I went to University of Manchester, who lay claim to having the first digital electronic stored-program computer, and was taught by two of the PhDs (professors by the time I knew them) who worked on the Mk I. Dad also was maintaining mainframes in 1961. Having run a 1960s mainframe at school, it's left me with something of an interest. (Edit) 5 1/4" floppies?! New technology! (looks at the pile of 8" floppies in the corner on top of the PDP-11, just by the QIC-150 tape drive)

[Guy N. Heels]

Yes, oil-cooled. As one of his many maintenance jobs, my father wrote test code to exercise different parts of the system - and got rounded on by the hardware designers for writing code that continually flipped one word of memory to test the oil cooling. "It's not designed to take that - the cores will overheat!"

I'll look at alt.folklore.computers - hadn't seen that. I went to University of Manchester, who lay claim to having the first digital electronic stored-program computer, and was taught by two of the PhDs (professors by the time I knew them) who worked on the Mk I. Dad also was maintaining mainframes in 1961. Having run a 1960s mainframe at school, it's left me with something of an interest.

(Edit) 5 1/4" floppies?! New technology! (looks at the pile of 8" floppies in the corner on top of the PDP-11, just by the QIC-150 tape drive)

Manchester? Wasn't that the home of the "BRAINIAC", that vacuum-tubed monstrocity? Er- uh, excuse me, I think you Britts call 'em valves.

So sorry, I finally got rid of all my 8" floppies. They make pretty good mortarboards for graduating pre-kindergarteners.

[Ozzard]

'Wasn't that the home of the "BRAINIAC"'

University of Pennsylvania for ENIAC (but that wasn't stored-program), Cambridge (UK) for EDSAC. Manchester had the much more prosaically-named Mark 1, and before that the Baby (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-Scale_Experimental_Machine). http://www.computer50.org/ for more information if you're interested - there are some fun snippets in there for the technically-minded.

Aside: A 4th-generation Manchester machine - Atlas - was the first computer with virtual memory. I heard (but cannot vouch for the accuracy of) a story that University of Manchester held the patent on virtual memory for some time, before it was sold to IBM for far too small an amount of money because someone at UoM didn't know what they were selling.

[Guy N. Heels]

'Wasn't that the home of the "BRAINIAC"'

...Aside: A 4th-generation Manchester machine - Atlas - was the first computer with virtual memory. I heard (but cannot vouch for the accuracy of) a story that University of Manchester held the patent on virtual memory for some time, before it was sold to IBM for far too small an amount of money because someone at UoM didn't know what they were selling.

That's usually the case. Somebody will one day develop an anit-grav drive and sell it for peanuts because he doesn't realize the potential of what he has in his hands. Just one example, the guy that drew the icon of the dog and the victrola sold it to RCA for something like $35 because he needed money to buy a meal.

[dr1819]

I recall the day in the early-1980s when the university I attended (20,000+ students) announced that the total storage capacity for all computers and their storage devices (mainly large platters and tape) had finally exceeded 1 Terabyte. These days, that's just a few hundred dollars away, what with the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 HD 750GB SATA II drive available for just $360. Just think - I could have a 1.4 TB RAID 5 array for under $1,600. That blows my mind!

[Guy N. Heels]

I recall the day in the early-1980s when the university I attended (20,000+ students) announced that the total storage capacity for all computers and their storage devices (mainly large platters and tape) had finally exceeded 1 Terabyte.

These days, that's just a few hundred dollars away, what with the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 HD 750GB SATA II drive available for just $360.

Just think - I could have a 1.4 TB RAID 5 array for under $1,600.

That blows my mind!

That's nothing, the 1 Gb memory stick really blows me away! Just think, the day is rapidly approaching when even the 3.5" floppy drive will be history and all of us old fudds that remember all of the stuff that preceded that will also be regarded as living fossils.

[dr1819]

That's nothing, the 1 Gb memory stick really blows me away! Just think, the day is rapidly approaching when even the 3.5" floppy drive will be history and all of us old fudds that remember all of the stuff that preceded that will also be regarded as living fossils.

What's a "floppy"? Is that what happens when one's love life isn't as it should be?

Just kidding...

I grew up in the punch card era...

[Ozzard]

If you grew up in the punch card era, then 560-bit or 640-bit floppies should be well known to you!

[Guy N. Heels]

What's a "floppy"? Is that what happens when one's love life isn't as it should be?

Just kidding...

I grew up in the punch card era...

Holerith cards! Yeah, buddy! I used to carry a deck of "Friend" in my toolkit. Has anyone even got a card reader anymore?

[dr1819]

Holerith cards! Yeah, buddy! I used to carry a deck of "Friend" in my toolkit. Has anyone even got a card reader anymore?

I dunno! I'll bet someone has a working version, but the question remains, is it connected to anything that matters?

Just think - it was a 340-lb floppy drive that held, perhaps 10k of LAM (linea-access memory, aka, punch cards).

Probably cost $10k, too...

[Guy N. Heels]

I dunno! I'll bet someone has a working version, but the question remains, is it connected to anything that matters?

Just think - it was a 340-lb floppy drive that held, perhaps 10k of LAM (linea-access memory, aka, punch cards).

Probably cost $10k, too...

Oh yeah! Now I remember. I think they were using 'em for anchors on battleships until they decomissioned the battlewagons. Just one of those things was pretty well guaranteed to permanently anchor a destroyer in in place, unless you were willing to cut the chain.

[Guy N. Heels]

Does any body need any 5 1/4" floppies or a 10 platter cat-eye alignment pack? I'm selling out cheap. I really would hate to see the alignment pack go to the crusher.

[Ozzard]

I really would hate to see the alignment pack go to the crusher.

Look around for computer or technology museums and offer it to them. Seriously. I sold my Sun-2/50 to one a few years back, and my father donated several boards and notebooks plus photos of London Atlas to the Science Museum over here.

[Guy N. Heels]

I just figured-out that I've got to take over my daughter's 386 and mount a 5.25 floppy drive in it, or else I'll never be able to retrieve the stuff I've still got on floppies! I hope she didn't have any plans for her computer.

[thedesigner]

Mornington Crescent!!!! I win!!!!

[Guy N. Heels]

Mornington Crescent!!!! I win!!!!

What's he on about?

[Ozzard]

What's he on about?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mornington_Crescent_(game) might enlighten you. It is a classically English comment (and a classically English game).