20 May
2025
20 May
'25
5:51 p.m.
From what I was able to learn the 4004 based System 4 was implemented
in multiple systems
It ran systems at a Michigan-California Lumber Company sawmill, the
Comstar system was used in the grading and sorting operation, keeping
track of the number of boards that had gone into each bin and
activating a relay when a palette load was completed.
Another was a "tape editing system for Deluxe Check Printers. At that
time the check information was stored on a short strip of paper tape
included with each check order. When checks were re-ordered, the paper
tape drove the linotype machine that set the type for the check order.
When a bank was bought by another bank, it was necessary to change the
routing number on new check orders to the new bank's number. The
Comstar system would read each tape, look up the routing number in an
EPROM table and substitute the new routing number (and add an account
number prefix) if it found a match for the old routing number in the
table.
Another was in a Frozen food warehouse in Chicago (Beatrice Foods').
There were four four-story high stacker cranes running on tracks in
the floor that moved pallets from entrance turntables to the many
pallet slots in the four-story high pallet racks. There was a Comstar
machine in each crane cab to implement three-axis closed loop control
of the crane motors. There were also several other Comstar machines to
control the turntables, as well as a system of conveyer belts used to
move manually picked boxes from the pallets in the pallet slots to the
loading dock area for transfer to outbound trucks.
Comstar also worked with TRW on the street Lights in Baltimore.
I remember there was a brief mention of a water system that was run on
these computers
So the computers actually did stuff.
On Sat, May 17, 2025 at 12:03 PM dwight via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
It all depends on what one means by a computer that one could do useful things on. A
fellow named Tom Pittman wrote a 4004 assembler that ran on the SIM4-01 board, using a
teletype's tape reader as the source code and the intermediate output for the 2 pass
assembler. This assembler was released, through Intel, in the 4004 manual listed below.
I understand the assembler was used to write the code for a mailing list program. While
the ASR33 is not the best editing machine, some scissors, a splicing block and tape could
do the needed editing of paper tape.
The assembler also had the ability to stop and edit the tape being punched while
assembling.
I'd say that having an assembler would be sufficient to call it a general purpose
computer. Although, one didn't normally connect the 4004 up to program RAM, it could
be done as was done on the MOD4 development system. The 4004 was generally intended to run
code from ROMs and use RAM for temporary data. That doesn't mean it never had RAM for
program space.
I don't know what the Comstar systems had but Tom Pittman didn't let not having a
computer to work on stop him from using the 4004 as a computer.
Dwight