[cctalk] Re: Elliott Algol

On 2/15/25 15:31, Adrian Stoness via cctalk wrote: Nope.  In about 1973 or so, one of the guys in our group spotted a NASA listing of a Bendix G15 free for the cost of shipping (which was not insignificant!) He convinced the Engineering School to pay for it.  It had been on a NASA spaceflight tracking ship, and was "supposed" to be operational.  We got it delivered, hooked up to massive 240 V power feed, and started trying to learn how to run the thing. Nobody ever really got the hang of it, they were all used to lights and switches consoles.  The G15 did almost everything through the typewriter.  You could dump a block of drum tracks with a written command. I spent a few days poking at it and I really couldn't get it to do a whole lot.  Very likely dirty contacts in the keyboard were garbling the commands I thought I was entering.  I THINK the typewriter dutifully printed whatever you typed via mechanical coupling, even if the computer did not register those keystrokes. There was a huge box of telephone-style relays that sat under the typewriter that I think encoded the key contacts to a binary code.  So, PLENTY of contacts that could foul up the encoding. Anyway, I got pretty frustrated, and eventually pulled the cover off the drum and discovered there were two tracks totally scored down to the brass, and a couple more that were a bit scored.  The cover on the drum was just deep drawn aluminum with caterpillar grommets around the cable entries.  NOWHERE NEAR a hermetic seal! After that discovery, there was not much interest in the beast. Jon