Besides the relay-based Mark 1, the first electronic computer I programmed
was a Univac 1. Its memory consisted of 100 10-foot long acoustic delay
lines, each capable of storing 10 characters - don't remember what the
encoding was. You could walk into the main frame. Electronics was vacuum
tubes.
The tape drives used strings and pulleys to tension the tape. Later IBM
drives used vacuum lines, very sophisticated. All these drives would skip
blocks of data, so you had to store sequence numbers with the data so you
could check that a block was not dropped.
The IBM 650 had drum storage - no RAM. The programmer had to know at which
arc of rotation the drum was to optimize the code.
The first removable "cartridge" disk drives had 7 megabyte capacity. We
tried to use something called an IBM Datacell - RCA had a similar called
Race - with cut pieces of tape stored in cans. 400 megabytes of storage,
but it was never put in production.
We have it nice now! Just put 256 gig of DDS memory in an Intel NUC. Very
nice indeed.
Monty K2DLJ
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