Now you come to mention it, there's no guarantee that it was a computer.
What you describe may well have been it. Do you have any model numbers or
manuafcturers for that thing you described?
cheers,
paul
-----Original Message-----
From: ard(a)p850ug1.demon.co.uk [mailto:ard@p850ug1.demon.co.uk]
Sent: 27 March 2003 21:04
To: cctalk(a)classiccmp.org
Subject: Re: Identification of an old machine
This is going to be rather difficult I think. In 1977
when I first went to
high school, we had a visiting computer science teacher (the school didn't
own it's own computer). He used to come in with a PET mostly, but one day
he
couldn't bring the PET so came in with this old
machine which was roughly
cubic, each side about 2 foot. On the front it had a wiring panel where
you
had to plug in patch leads, and a rotary dial like on
old telephones which
was used to dial the numbers in. I don't remember how it displayed its
results.
Being a first year student and never faced with a computer before I had no
idea what to do with it, and so don't remember much about it. However, now
I'm intrigued - what was that beast? Does anyone have any ideas?
Are you sure it was a computer? And not a digital electronics 'trainer'?
There was a popular-ish school digital electronics trainer in the UK that
fits most of your description. It wasn't cubical, it was flat -- about 2'
long, 1' wide and a few inches high. There was a rotary telephone dial,
light bulbs, and patch sockets on the front. Inside were 5 or 6
flip-flops and a number of gates connected to the patch sockets. There
may have been other circuits, like a clock oscillator, monostables, etc too.
You could patch them together to make counters, shift registers,
combinatorial circuits, etc. Some of the 'applications' were quite fun
(there were certainly simple games for it, for example).
-tony