subject:"\[Elecraft\] OT\: High school drafting class, \~1975"

Re: [Elecraft] OT: High school drafting class, ~1975

2021-04-27 Thread Tom Azlin W7SUA


Have a slice of a core memory module here. ... somewhere.

Of course took drafting and electronics in high school as well as wood shop.

First computer I used was an IBM 1130. Learned how to build a machine 
language initial boot card where the 12 hole positions in a column could 
give me 80 short instructions from which I could build a few 16 bit 
instructions and yank in the remainder of the cards in the stack. And 
program by hand with the front panel switches. But also rewrote the 
keyboard and rotate/tilt code for the Selectric printer as interrupt 
driven.


Much easier these days.

73, tom w7sua

On 4/26/2021 2:33 PM, Mark Musick wrote:

OK, I can't resist any longer either.
I waited and bought the HP-45 when it came out. It had hyperbolic functions as 
well as polar to rectangular conversion functions. Being a EE the polar to 
rectangular conversion is why I bought it. It made life much easier. Of course 
my dad had a fit when he found out what I paid for it.

Now to the computers, how many of you youngsters out there remember core 
memory? For you really young folks there was no RAM. 0s and 1s were stored on 
toroidal cores on a back plane.
IN 1978, when I started at Public Service Company of Indiana (PSI), the local 
electric utility, we were using two 16 bit MODCOMP minicomputers. Each 
minicomputer had 64K of core memory for the supervisory control and data 
acquisition (SCADA) system. Each machine had a tape drive and two 360k disk 
drives. We thought we were downtown. The SCADA system was used to control and 
monitor the HV transmission system. 69kV - 765kV.

73,
Mark, WB9CIF

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Re: [Elecraft] OT: High school drafting class, ~1975

2021-04-27 Thread Doug Person

Fascinating walk through the past. I took mechanical drawing in my
freshman year. Our high school was 4 years and no junior high.
Mechanical drawing was by far my favorite class. I learned a lot about
dimensions, angles, areas - basic geometry. It made math make sense.

My first novice station in 1962 was a Halicrafters S38E receiver which
was terrible and a one-tube transmitter built from salvaged TV parts
that was in the 1962 ARRL Handbook - which I still have complete with
burn marks when I dropped the soldering iron on it. My father gave me
a Lafayette HE-10 receiver for Christmas that year. It was much better.

Ham radio and my familiarity with electronic circuits led me to a class
in Autocoder, an assembly language for an IBM computer from the 60's. I
don't recall what model. But - bits and bytes made perfect sense because
to me they were just a series of switches and the logic of ANDs, ORs,
XORs, etc were easy for me to visualize. I just thought of current
making its way through a matrix of on or off switches. I proceeded to
take ever computer class offered in that community college.

Although there have been many working titles for someone who writes
code, and I've had about a dozen, I've always been proud to call myself
a computer programmer. Nothing more and nothing less.

73, Doug -- K0DXV

On 4/26/2021 2:19 PM, John Saxon via Elecraft wrote:

I have greatly enjoyed the memory fest here. Wasn't going to join in, but,
Steve, your email really hit close to home. I replied to Steve, intended for
whole group.

Took 'Mechanical Drawing' in Jr. high, loved it. Also had drawing classes
(course also included slide rule) first semester of college.

I was a co-op student in EE and worked for NASA 1962-1967. I was placed in a
software group, kinda out of my degree, but I liked it and spent my career as a
Software Engineer (in the day we were called 'programmers.')
I was greatly blessed to be working at NASA at the beginning of operations in
Houston. The first computer I worked on was an IBM 7094, 32K of 36 bit words,
2 microsecond cycle time, mag tape OS, no disk. We were located in what had
been the PBS TV studio on the University of Houston campus, reworked to be a
computer center - the space center (MSC) was under construction. Languages
were FORTRAN II, assembly (FAP) and eventually FORTRAN IV and assembly. Punch
cards of course.
Slide rules indeed! However, we also had a Friden mechanical calculator which
could do square roots!!

Ham rig at the time was a homebrew 6AU6-6146 from a QST article and
Hallicrafters S-19R with Heathkit Q multiplier, dipole on 40m cw.
As you, Steve, indicated I could not afford the HP 'digital slide rule' -- bought
the TI version about a year later for a cost 1/2 of the HP, used it for years.
Still have my K DECI-LON (and a B-29 'Load Adjuster' slide rule from WWII).
I remember all the items you mentioned.
Finally (at last) I often tell younger folks (I am 77) that they have orders of
magnitude more power in their cell phones than we had in our gigantic computers
-- BUT -- we put men on the moon with 'em.
Sorry for the wide bandwidth,73,John K5ENQ

On Monday, April 26, 2021, 10:36:33 AM CDT, SteveL
wrote:

I envied a friend in a EE program and the University of Cincinnati. He had the first HP-35 I’d ever seen the year it was introduced (1972), but it was way out of my budget as a new freshman studying Engineering.

A couple of months after my friend acquired the HP-35, to my fascination he
received a letter from HP detailing a list of obscure calculations the device
performed in error (the tangent of 98.2352…, etc.) . The letter went on to
describe that these were determined and then verified by computer simulation of
the computational algorithms used internally - a concept new to this budding
engineer. And, if he returned the calculator, it would be repaired and
corrected.

And to think we basically flew to the moon on a slide rule? Who could ever
imagine a computer that could fit into one room? (Paraphrasing a line from
early in the Apollo 13 movie.)

Who carried around a CRC book of tables of various calculations in lieu of an
unaffordable scientific calculator?
Or programming FORTRAN on punch cards?
Or PDP-8 on paper tape after toggling in the boot loader through the front
panel switches?

We’ve come a long way! I love the reminiscences…

Steve
aa8af

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