30 Jul
2014
30 Jul
'14
6:59 a.m.
On Jul 29, 2014, at 7:58 PM, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
On 07/29/2014 02:05 PM, Paul Koning wrote:
I did some work in college on our 1620 model 2. It looks like that has a 1625, not 1623,
core memory cabinet. Ours came with the full load of 60k memory, as well as a card
reader/punch, the Selectric style console, a 1403 line printer, and a pair of 1311 disk
drives. Hydraulic head actuators, far out.
One of my classmates used it to run Dynamo, the simulations of the Club of Rome report
that was all the rage back then.
I remember the Fortran compiler had options to specify how many digits to use for an
integer and for a float variable. Yes, it had floating point, and that too was variable
length (in the mantissa; exponent was always 2 digits).
Has anyone managed to preserve a copy of SPS?
paul
I wonder how the equivalent test on an IBM 1620
would behave. No
length field there, just an end of operand marker, so you could make
numbers as big as can fit in memory (60k digits in a max
configuration).
I've never seen a 1623 expansion unit in the metal, so to speak--they must have been
very scarce indeed--all of the 1620s that I've run into have been CADETs, though some
of the front panels used on "The FORBIN project" as props probably were Mod IIs
or maybe even 1710s. Funny, the movie itself that used old computer junk is itself an
antique now.