19 May
2024
19 May
'24
4:54 p.m.
In my post about the accounting machine era I forgot to mention that
of course they were all programmable; the mechanical versions used
different length pins, sometimes custom made with a special tool, that
went into a 'magazine' to define the various columns and the
operations to be performed there; as electronics started to take over,
patch panels full of jumper wires (just like IBM's EAM panels)
appeared, and finally 'soft' programming appeared with assemblers,
report generators and 'high' level languages cross-compiled on larger
systems.
Programs were loaded by inserting a 'magazine' (usually about 30" long
and weighing about 10 lbs.), inserting a patch panel, or the 'modern
way' from punched cards*, paper tape, magnetic cards, mag tape or
cassette, diskette or even remotely.
*Another innovation was the 'Edge punched card', a card normally the
size of an 80 column Hollerith card but with 8-column paper tape
punched holes along the edge so it could be read with a PPT reader.
A shame that there isn't a video anywhere of an operator entering data
into a Burroughs L9000 and then processing it with 4 cassettes
spinning back and forth like their big brothers, automatically feeding
ledger cards through the console and the external high-speed reader,
printing a log and reports on the dual console printer and the
external high-speed printer, maybe sending summary data to a remote
system etc., while the operator takes a coffee break.
BTW, AFAIK the Burroughs B80 and B90 were the last machines of this
class and the only ones with (8") diskette drives; does anyone know of
any later ones?
m
On Sun, May 19, 2024 at 11:28 AM Tarek Hoteit via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
A friend of a friend had a birthday gathering. Everyone there was in their thirties,
except for myself, my wife, and our friend. Anyway, I met a Google engineer, a Microsoft
data scientist, an Amazon AWS recruiter (I think she was a recruiter), and a few others in
tech who are friends with the party host. I had several conversations about computer
origins, the early days of computing, its importance in what we have today, and so on.
What I found disappointing and saddening at the same time is their utmost ignorance about
computing history or even early computers. Except for their recall of the 3.5 floppy or
early 2000’s Windows, there was absolutely nothing else that they were familiar with. That
made me wonder if this is a sign that our living version of classical personal computing,
in which many of us here in this group witnessed the invention of personal computing in
the 70s, will stop with our generation. I assume that the most engaging folks in this
newsgroup are in their fifties and beyond. (No offense to anyone. I am turning fifty
myself) I sense that no other generation following this user group's generation will
ever talk about Altairs, CP/M s, PDPs, S100 buses, Pascal, or anything deemed exciting in
computing. Is there hope, or is this the end of the line for the most exciting era of
personal computers? Thoughts?
Regards,
Tarek Hoteit