Rich kids are into COBOL

On 03/02/2015 12:19 AM, Mark Linimon wrote: The G-15 had a drum sectored off into short lines and long lines. the long lines were the "main memory", the short lines were the register set. Each line had a write head, read head and an erase magnet, except for the clock track, which only had a read head, and was recorded at the factory. So, whenever you turned the machine off, the drum was erased. The sealing of the drum was REALLY bad, just an aluminum cover with a bundle of wires fed through a hole with caterpillar grommet around the edge. So, the drum area was FULL of dirt, and some had wedged against the heads and scored several tracks. At least one track was scored down to brass. We tried writing data to the drum and reading it back, but got a lot of garbage. There were probably some bad tubes in the machine, too. Jon