>From what I was able to learn the 4004 based System 4 was implemented in multiple systems
It ran systems at a Michigan-California Lumber Company sawmill, the Comstar system was used in the grading and sorting operation, keeping track of the number of boards that had gone into each bin and activating a relay when a palette load was completed. Another was a "tape editing system for Deluxe Check Printers. At that time the check information was stored on a short strip of paper tape included with each check order. When checks were re-ordered, the paper tape drove the linotype machine that set the type for the check order. When a bank was bought by another bank, it was necessary to change the routing number on new check orders to the new bank's number. The Comstar system would read each tape, look up the routing number in an EPROM table and substitute the new routing number (and add an account number prefix) if it found a match for the old routing number in the table. Another was in a Frozen food warehouse in Chicago (Beatrice Foods'). There were four four-story high stacker cranes running on tracks in the floor that moved pallets from entrance turntables to the many pallet slots in the four-story high pallet racks. There was a Comstar machine in each crane cab to implement three-axis closed loop control of the crane motors. There were also several other Comstar machines to control the turntables, as well as a system of conveyer belts used to move manually picked boxes from the pallets in the pallet slots to the loading dock area for transfer to outbound trucks. Comstar also worked with TRW on the street Lights in Baltimore. I remember there was a brief mention of a water system that was run on these computers So the computers actually did stuff. On Sat, May 17, 2025 at 12:03 PM dwight via cctalk <[email protected]> wrote: > > > It all depends on what one means by a computer that one could do useful > things on. A fellow named Tom Pittman wrote a 4004 assembler that ran on the > SIM4-01 board, using a teletype's tape reader as the source code and the > intermediate output for the 2 pass assembler. This assembler was released, > through Intel, in the 4004 manual listed below. > I understand the assembler was used to write the code for a mailing list > program. While the ASR33 is not the best editing machine, some scissors, a > splicing block and tape could do the needed editing of paper tape. > The assembler also had the ability to stop and edit the tape being punched > while assembling. > I'd say that having an assembler would be sufficient to call it a general > purpose computer. Although, one didn't normally connect the 4004 up to > program RAM, it could be done as was done on the MOD4 development system. The > 4004 was generally intended to run code from ROMs and use RAM for temporary > data. That doesn't mean it never had RAM for program space. > I don't know what the Comstar systems had but Tom Pittman didn't let not > having a computer to work on stop him from using the 4004 as a computer. > Dwight > >
