19 May
2024
19 May
'24
4:12 p.m.
What I find a little sad is that the accounting machine world has been
almost entirely ignored.
The punched card batch processing systems such as IBM's 402/403/407
machines and peripherals are documented and even still in existence here
and there, but the manual entry machines that could once be found in every
bank branch or small office and were the foundations of computer companies
like Burroughs, NCR etc. have largely disappeared and are pretty sparsely
documented.
It's quite interesting to follow their evolution from motor-driven purely
mechanical monsters full of cams, levers and springs corresponding to and
actually called accumulators, registers etc. to completely solid state
electronic systems with disk and tape drives, displays and terminals, line
printers, communication capability, PPT and punched card devices etc. etc.
Along the way there were many interesting innovations like small 96 column
punched cards, magnetic striped ledger cards and automatic feeder/stackers,
multiple cassette drives equivalent to the open reel versions, custom
devices like the 'core counter' (a non-volatile electro-magnetic device
that emitted a pulse for every 10 input pulses) etc.; a shame that so
little documentation and examples remain today.
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