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On the subject of sounds .. a few years back I was paged whilst round a friend's house having a regular night out role-playing. Not a good start to the evening, but ... I call in and the Operatr there explained what had happened (an error message coming from a backup script for a Unix server). As it happened I knew exactly what would have acused it so I took a chance, knowing the Op in question and satrted with, "Ok, Jayne, type: vi ..." at which point I heard one oif my freind's neck crack as he whip-lashed round to atare at me (he was also into IT and knew what I was about to do ...). I told Jayne what we woudl be doing and she followed instructions and at one point I had to say, "stop, you typed that wrong ..." as I could hear the pattern of her keystrokes and realised she had mis-typed ... sad, huh? Got it sorted, saved the script, re-ran it, it ran fine, went back to role-playing
Yeah, in 1968 the IBM 1130 that we had at FIT had 8K 16-bit words of core memory at first. It was upgraded a year or so later to 16K when they added an extension the size of a two drawer file cabinet for the 2nd disk drive.
And in 1974 the Raytheon 706 that I had at the space center started out with 8K 16-bit words and was never updated because the cost of an additional 8K core memory was more than buying a brand new Raytheon RDS-500 that came with 16K 16-bit words solid state memory already installed. We kept both Raytheons but they were isolated machines, and were used for separate tasks. No network connections or even hardware provided by the manufacturer to permit any networking. However, later it was advantageous for me to find a way to share information between them other than punching cards on one and reading on the other. So I found an appropriate spot on the wirewrap backplane of each computer and ran a couple of wires between the two computers and devised a serial data protocol to make my own in-lab "network".
That was back in the day when computers came with shelves of documentation. Schematics, parts lists, etc.
I remember my first computer. It was a Packard Bell and it cost me a little over $4000.00 I remember that with it I could download a picture from a local college bulliten board in less that one hour. Who says the "good old days"....
I remember using Usenet to send messages from Germany to a friend in the USA. Usually took only 2 to 3 days to arrive there. Compared to letters (the real paper version) that was extremely fast... Good old days!
Ah ha, found a photo of a Raytheon706 system. A bit bigger than mine but basically the same. I only had 4 racks of electronics and only one tape drive, but I also had a Gould 4800 electrostatic printer for graphic output in addition to the printer shown in the photo. This was mid 1970s.
I loved that machine.
I just went back through this thread and found this reply that I missed earlier. Nice story about the RAD crash!
After Xerox bought out SDS the company was called XDS so we didn't have any SEX manuals.
But I do remember that all the process control language commands that were entered at the beginning of card program decks and on the console always started with an exclamation point character (!) as the first character, but the designated name for the exclamation point was "Bang". So we always talked about making sure we had the right "bang cards" in the deck. No SEX but there was a lot of bangs. This was late 1960s.
Just happened across this video on YouTube of a restored IBM 1401 from (1959) being used to compile and run a FORTRAN program to do some matrix math. Which is kind of unusual because the 1401 was essentially a business machine that worked primarily with characters and simple integer arithmetic.
Fascinating video for us old fogies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFQ3sajIdaM
Wow! What a find! Thanks for posting! Looks almost like new.
It is facinating, but I prefer "geezer" or "mangey old git"
Yeah, I was thinking about that and came back to edit my post to say "old-timers" and "nostalgic" instead of "fascinating". And perhaps it's a reminder that the old days were perhaps not so wonderful after all because I remember a lot of those little problems every day.
I think I particularly remember the tape drive not being wound up on the take-up reel enough to keep the vacuum column from sucking the tape right off the take-up reel and me having to start the tape load all over again.
A thousand little activities every day that one would strive to do as quickly as possible just to get the meaningful work done.
Activities like: Riffling cards and chunking them on the table to make the deck flush before inserting into the hopper.
Stupidly putting the deck in backwards or upside down.
Forgetting the blank card at the end of a deck so that the last data card would be read.
Hearing the crunch of paper jamming in the high speed fan-fold paper printer.
Running behind the printer to catch the fan-fold paper comming out of the printer flopping out onto the floor instead of into the box and getting caught by the wind from the air-conditioner and blowing 30 feet of paper across the lab.
Leaving the printer gate open and having to run across the room to shut it.
Screaming to your fellow minions over the clatter of the printer and the roar of the fans and air-conditioners.
Hearing the crunch of the high speed card reader as it obliterated your last copy of your data deck.
Watching the tape drives go into rewind and running back to grab the next tape in sequence so that you could dismount the old tape and remount the new tape before the computer needed it.
Emptying the chad from the bit bucket of the high speed card punch and the keypunch machines. Keeping the chad from the bit-buckets away from the evil minds of the students.
Hearing an unexpected quiet when you knew there should be some noise of productive activity.
Pressing a big green "START" button and nothing happening.
All so much fun.
The CDC-6500 at Purdue had a few interesting issues - the card punch was built with a chad-basket full cutoff that was set for a steel bucket, but the bucket we had was plastic. So you knew it needed to be emptied when you looked at it and saw the chad sifting out of the base of the punch. And then there were the tape drives - they used a twist-clamp hub, not a lever latch. And if you gave the hub a crisp twist to unmount a tape the hub tended to come apart and rain washers down into the sealed vacuum columns.Good thing Purdue had two CDC engineers on-site 8 to 5 weekdays.
But the most fun was watching the CEs power up the disk system. There was a vertical spindle at each end of the box, with 25 (IIRC) platters about 40+ inches in diameter and dual hydraulic access assemblies at each end. The problem was that the head assemblies would do a full extend to unlock the heads before the spindles were running fast enough to have an air-cushion to support the heads . . So one CE was at one end, looking at the tachometer (and holding the main breaker) while the other was at the front center looking at the hydraulic pressure. The key was that the spindles didn't slow down as fast as the pressure dropped, so they'd call out speed and pressure to each other, kill the breaker, let things unwind, and then kick the breaker in again. Usually took close to half an hour to get it up and running.
The other item of interest was the dual-crt console and the self-aware bit of the OS that new when it was lost beyond hope. On the 6500 the startup was called a "dead start". And at times, ust sitting at the console, both screens would go blank - and then the left screen would pop in a big block letter "DEAD" and the right would show "START" - and then the words would lside away from each other - and then scroll up from the bottom - and blink alternately. All the while, a sonalert was supposed to be screaming, but the wires to it got cut the second time it went off.
And one other item - the mainframe was water-cooled, with big aluminum fins in between the electronic boards. If the humidity go high enough for moisture to start condensing on the fins a different sonalert started screaming, letting everyone in the room know that there were 60 seconds to reduce the humidity before the system automatically shut down.
Fun times!
...
...ahh, the good old days.
As Al Bundy always said "Good times...good times"
No worries, I was joking! I readily answer to "old fogey", but my local friends refer to me by the other handles, all are appropriate!
Speaking of FORTRAN compilation on old machines. The video of the 1401 doing a compile mentions, I think, that the FORTRAN compiler had 17 phases read from a tape. That was in early '60s technology. By mid '60s our college IBM 1130 (a much smaller machine) also had a FORTRAN compiler but it could be read from the hard drive (ooh, fancy). However, the 1130 computer didn't have to be bought with a hard drive so you could get your FORTRAN compiler on punched cards. A couple thousand punched cards of binary executable code. It was a big deal to do a FORTRAN compilation from cards. We never had to do it but we did find the manual that described how to do it and it involved reading your source deck, the compiler deck, punched intermediate decks, final output decks. All complicated by the fact that the FORTRAN compiler had not 3 phases, or even 17 phases, but something like 27 phases! It would pass through your FORTRAN source code 27 times tackling certain parts of the compilation process each time. Remember the machine would only have 8K of memory, no tape, no disk, just punched cards, so not much could be kept in memory for each pass.
Oh, that wasn't the end of the process. The FORTRAN compiler produced an Assembler language card deck that you then had to run through the binary punched card Assembler deck to finally punch out a binary executable card deck that you could read into memory to be executed. Thank god our 1130 had a disk drive. But the computer room storage cabinet did have the FORTRAN compiler card deck and the Assembler card deck in their respective boxes on the shelf, just in case! Of course being nerds, we had to try it and it took us all night to do one FORTRAN compilation.
But anytime you ran large numbers of binary punched cards with lots of holes in them through the high speed card reader there was the risk that the reader was hungry and would eat 2 or three cards for a snack. Standard alphanumeric punched cards were pretty safe they only had two or three holes max per column. But binary cards could have every hole punched making the card very weak. I've spent several hours finding all the pieces of a chewed up card, flattening them out and putting the puzzle back together and sitting at the keypunch manually repunching hole by hole a munched binary card.