Sorry, We are wading through and reminiscing about our early engineering training in the 1960’s and into the 1970’s…
The CRC? A thick book of tables of computed values. If you wanted to know the sine of some value? You could look it up. The same for logarithm, root, other trig functions, and so forth. The book was simply hundreds of pages of math function tables. A PDP-8 (or 11 or…) were early commercial computers produced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Design was based on simple IC gates of various types - no microprocessors yet. Core memory was based on tiny magnetic beads threaded through with sensing and magnetizing wires. Disk drives were new in the 60’s and very expensive. A drive the size of a top loading washing machine only held 300MB in the late 70’s. As such, storage like punch cards, punched paper tape, and magnetic tape was widely used. DEC even had a random access tape drive (DEC Tape) that increased utility and speed. FORTRAN was an early algorithmic programming language that supported equation like statements. It was well suited for math problems - not general data oriented. Your program was written on paper cards punched with holes whose pattern represented letters and numbers. A typewriter like “card punch” facilitated creating these cards. Cards were read into the computer when you wanted to run the program. Program storage was a box you carried your card deck around in. It all seems so primitive now! I could not afford the HP35 - my first calculator was a TI (Texas Instruments) SR-10. This was 4 functions plus square, square root, and reciprocals. So I carried around the CRC and slide rule as well. This was replaced by an SR-51 which had full trig functions. This was the closest we could imagine as a “personal computer”. My station? Heathkit HR10b receiver and Ameco AC-1. Novice call signs all included “N” as the second letter. Frequency was crystal controlled. Steve aa8af and once upon a time WN8CYL (which I now wish I could have retained somehow) > On Apr 26, 2021, at 5:12 PM, MIKE ZANE <n...@comcast.net> wrote: > > What the heck are all those things you guys are talking about? Mike n6zw >> On 04/26/2021 11:18 AM Bill Frantz <fra...@pwpconsult.com >> <mailto:fra...@pwpconsult.com>> wrote: >> >> >> OK, I can't resist any longer. >> >> On 4/26/21 at 11:33 AM, lawr...@woh.rr.com (SteveL) wrote: >> >>> Who carried around a CRC book of tables of various calculations in lieu of >>> an unaffordable scientific calculator? >> Yup. >> >>> Or programming FORTRAN on punch cards? >> Yup. At first on a IBM 650 with a 4 pass compiler, intermediate >> storage on punch cards. >> >>> Or PDP-8 on paper tape after toggling in the boot loader through the front >>> panel switches? >> Sorry, mine was a Varian 620/i (8K of 16 bit words) used for >> nodes in a circuit switched data network (Tymnet). :-) >> ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html Message delivered to arch...@mail-archive.com
