15 Jul
2015
15 Jul
'15
5:56 p.m.
Saul is indeed cited in the ACM article,
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=365671
I know that Purdue had some folks that did their own maintenance, and
sure, by the late 1960's one could certain pick them up cheap - the gold
scrappers were not quite the issue they became later. I know this
because, besides the 7094 II that I did some work on (including
replacing a germanium transistor with a modern silicon one at one
point), the U. Wisconsin Chemistry department had a 7090 (oil core) on
the 9th floor. Some folks from Purdue came up at one point and helped
fix a problem with it.
Around 1975 the IBM 1410 and the IBM 7094 II we played with at UW were
sold to a company in Ohio - or at least pieces were. Paul Pierce and I
went back to that same company in 1998 and recovered some of the IBM
1410 and IBM 709x tapes that he lists on his site - Paul has an amazing
setup where he reads the tapes *analog* using a 7 track drive, and then
post-processes the results to de-skew and recover the data.
JRJ
On 7/15/2015 7:12 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 07/15/2015 04:05 PM, Jay Jaeger wrote:
Paul adapted PUFFT (Purdue University Fast
FORTRAN Translator) to do
RS-232 bit serial I/O through a sense switch, and I wrote a spooling
program that ran on a Datacraft 6024 located in the same room to do the
card reading and printing. I suppose somewhere inside of it the DC 6024
was humiliated - I expect that it was much faster than the 7094 II. ;)
I remember PUFFT--that was Saul Rosen's baby, wasn't it? A FORTRAN for
undergrads--put in anything that *resembled* a FORTRAN statement and get
some sort of result. Missing parentheses? Misspelling? Outright
syntax errors? No problem. I think Purdue had two 709x systems for
PUFFT The CDC 6500 was reserved for Serious Work.
I understand that at the time, 7090/7094's were comparatively plentiful
and (comparatively) inexpensive, hence their use.
Liquid nitrogen would be the "or worse"
part. ;)
Neil had a lot of interesting stories about the ETA-10 (originally named
the GF-10 for the target of 10 gigaflops). It all seemed so fantastic
back then.
Ah, it's all fun...
--Chuck