1 Mar
2026
1 Mar
'26
12:04 p.m.
Hi All:
My comments, worth two cents or less.
The first computer I ever used was an IBM 1130 my city’s school district office at when I
was a 14-year-old high school student. This was in 1974. My exploration of the “IBM Disk
Monitor System" on the machine led to me clobbering the FORTRAN compiler on the
removable hard disk by mistake one evening. The disk had a form factor similar to the DEC
RK05.
Staff discovered the problem the next morning and had to reload the compiler from punched
cards. They told me that they restored the entire system disk (OS and FORTRAN) rather
than just the compiler. I saw the ~5 drawers of punched cards that they used for this. I
was mortified at my mistake and expected that I was in BIG trouble. Apparently the
restore took most of the day.
In this case it looks like the OS was held as backup on cards. It was a small
installation and there were no peripherals other than a card reader and the integrated
system console.
In bigger installations I agree, magtape was probably the standard media.
Postscript: don’t submit a DUP job:
// XEQ DUP
*DEFINE VOID FORTRAN
on an 1130. This does NOT give you examples of invalid FORTRAN code or errors, as my
young mind surmised, but deletes the FORTRAN compiler.
I got in trouble, but it wasn’t serious as I made an honest error, driven by curiosity.
Kevin
On Mar 1, 2026, at 11:47 AM, Paul Koning via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
On Mar 1, 2026, at 2:34 AM, Steve Lewis via
cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
...
Anyway, apologies - it was just something that only recently occurred to
me, that basically all of the original operating systems originated on
punch cards: CTSS, Supervisor, AOSP, SCOPE, even MULTICs.
That's certainly not true. It may be true for card-centric outfits like IBM. I
don't know what early DEC development looked like, but considering the rarity of card
handling equipment on DEC systems I would expect paper tape.
Early software for the Dutch machines I know was done on paper tape. In some cases that
involved punch equipment with custom-designed coding; for example, the Electrologica X1
had a rudimentary assembler in ROM (along with a BIOS) and source text was given to it on
5-channel paper tape, in a code slightly above straight binary machine language.
Its successor the X8 had paper tape I/O standard, and the standard executable file
loaders used paper tapes. Ditto the bootstrap. The famous THE operating system was a
paper tape batch system, with the OS image supplied on tape (though I think at some point
it was moved to magtape for faster startup). No punched cards were seen there until the
X8 was replaced by a Burroughs 6800, circa 1974, and even that machine had paper tape
input to support all the applications that had the input data on paper tape. My
father's precision measurement lab (part of the ME department) had instruments that
punched the measurements onto paper tape, for later processing by that central computer
system. All that was in ALGOL, by the way.
paul