Do it Yourself: Re: [DIY] Re: FASCINATING PROGRAMMABLE MACHINE FROM LONG AGO

01 October 2013

Re: [DIY] Re: FASCINATING PROGRAMMABLE MACHINE FROM LONG AGO

I gained a degree of notoriety and resulting employment with Sperry Rand for having located the broken hair thin wire in a core memory and repairing it in the field because there were no spares to be had in the system. They were slow, they were cranky but they were also non volatile which made them great for some applications. We were before the chip and TTL was indeed Two Transistor Logic, and the cute tricks we used to compensate for pulse delays due to the length of wires between logic cards. Back then we wrote our own trouble shooting routines, and had blisters on our index fingers from entering commands and data at the accumulator level. I hate to admit, it but those were not the "Good Old Days."

Dale in the Flatlands. "Why waste time learning when ignorance is instantaneous."

ray wrote:

The first computer I repaired had a whopping 4K of iron core memory, no disks, no tape, a multi-card reader/punch/printer and a line printer. The big upgrade came when they double the memory to 8k! (and it filled up a good sized room too)
Ray

On 9/30/2013 12:21 PM, Dale S wrote:

I go back to the early 60's when every thing we did was in machine language. No monitors and drum or chain printers were the mode of the day. Punch tape storage, 16 bit serial and 250 kHz rotating drum or disc driven clock. How things have changed. I still have my first double floppy disc PC in the attic, no hard drive but it did have an RBG monitor, WOW. My first personal computer used an audio tape deck for storage and a B/W TV for output, it may still be up there as well. In the early 60's very few collages offered computer courses and those that did were using on site main frames with very limited capabilities. I was sent to computer science school complements of the US Navy.

Dale in the Flatlands. "Why waste time learning when ignorance is instantaneous."
Mountain Master wrote:

I am retired programmer/engineer/designer///the Letter Wheel, which is the
heart of the little writer, can be re-programmed to write anything....that is
indeed the roots of programming...I wonder if Babbage and Boole (1791 -the first
analytical machine, known as the father of the computer) knew each other as
they were of the same era and Babbage did work in Geneva I believe//

It is truely Amazing.....BUT he must be a lonely automaton...isn't there
a girl writer for him? (LOL)

____________________

Forever bonded We Band of Brothers

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