Reproducing old machines with newer technology (Re: PDP-12 at the RICM)

-----Original Message----- From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Jay Jaeger Sent: 16 July 2015 01:56 To: cctalk at classiccmp.org Subject: Re: Reproducing old machines with newer technology (Re: PDP-12 at the RICM) 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 > > > > >