This is all very interesting. My first real programming job was as a coop student at a DuPont nylon manufacturing plant in Seaford, Delaware. I was in the Works Engineering Department which was responsible for the onsite power plant, the electricians, the electronics shop, and engineering planning for all those areas. Each quarter I was rotated to a different area. My forth quarter back at work I was in the planning area. The company had just replaced their 1410 system for one of those new fangled 360 computers. They had also gotten a 1620 for the engineering planning group. I became the programmer for the group. In successive quarters back I stayed in that group. My two biggest accomplishments were a fairly simple generalized statistical routine and a planning program for the onsite power plant to track the power usage and plan upgrades. By the way, the nickname of the 1620 was the CADET for Can't Add and Doesn't Even Try. It didn't have the normal addition/multiplication registers of the 360. Instead it did all of it's addition and multiplication via table lookup from tables it kept on the rotating disk. I understand that the same hardware design was used in the first IBM 3890 Check Sorters. The main function of those machines was to determine a sort pocket for the check by looking up the routing transit code and/or account number in a table.
Tom Kelman Enterprise Capacity Planner Commerce Bank of Kansas City (816) 760-7632 > -----Original Message----- > From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On > Behalf Of Joel C. Ewing > Sent: Monday, April 19, 2010 8:06 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: 45 years of Mainframe > > On 04/19/2010 05:06 PM, Tom Russell wrote: > >> I, alas, started on a much slower > >> machine, the 650, about which I feel *no* nostalgia. I do, however, > >> have fond memories of the 7094. > > > > Nice. My first job as a coop student at IBM was to convert a 650 SOAP > > program that ran the Toronto plant to a 1401 card system Autocoder > > program. I think I still have the card systems Autocoder compiler decks > > somewhere. I did read the SOAP program to figure out what the program > did, > > but never wrote any 650 code myself. > > > > Not a fond memory, but an interesting one. The 650 we were taking out > had > > a 2 (4?) KB drum memory. The autocoder (think BAL) program I wrote to > > replace it was for a 4 KB 1401 card system. High/Low/Equal compare was > a > > special feature on a 1401. > > > > > > Tom Russell > > > > IBM 650 drum memory was in 40 tracks or 50 words, containing decimal > digits, not Bytes. Total capacity was 2000 words, with each word an > instruction or data, 10 decimal digits plus sign, each digit represented > by bi-quinary encoding (7 bits). It could be thought of as roughly > equivalent to 20K decimal digits or 10K characters. > > Around 1961-1962 as a high school student in Norman, OK, I read the IBM > 650 manuals and wrote some simple code examples for the 650 at O.U.; but > it was an expensive and temperamental beast with no free time, so I was > steered toward a new IBM 1620 that had much idle time, and learned to do > my first real programming on that machine. The IBM 650 was replaced not > that long after with an IBM 1410. I can still recall people discussing > research that was negatively impacted by the need to re-write > application code whenever a new machine was acquired. > > -- > Joel C. Ewing, Fort Smith, AR [email protected] > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO > Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html ***************************************************************************** If you wish to communicate securely with Commerce Bank and its affiliates, you must log into your account under Online Services at http://www.commercebank.com or use the Commerce Bank Secure Email Message Center at https://securemail.commercebank.com NOTICE: This electronic mail message and any attached files are confidential. The information is exclusively for the use of the individual or entity intended as the recipient. If you are not the intended recipient, any use, copying, printing, reviewing, retention, disclosure, distribution or forwarding of the message or any attached file is not authorized and is strictly prohibited. If you have received this electronic mail message in error, please advise the sender by reply electronic mail immediately and permanently delete the original transmission, any attachments and any copies of this message from your computer system. ***************************************************************************** ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
