On the bookshelf behind me in my office is an IBM carriage control tape punch. In the late 1970s I rented time on an IBM Model 40. It had no attached unit record hardware because the 2821 control unit was still used on 370 hardware and cost more than the Model 40! There was a 1401 with 4 7-track mag tape drives, a card reader, and a 1403 (not the model with the power lid). You would punch up your job cards, put them in the reader behind a well-worn small deck containing a program to read the cards and copy them to tape, then hang the tape on the a 7-track drive attached to the Model 40 to read in your job. Printed output was written to another 7-track mag tape, then taken to the 1401 to print. (I still have DOS Release 26 SYSRES packs for 2311 (1316) and 2314 (2316) drives/disk packs).
Being an old guy I punched a lot of tape on an ASR-33. I have a roll of paper tape that I recall getting at a meeting of the Denver Amateur Computer Society in '75. A couple of young guys named Bill Gates and Paul Allen were touring computer clubs showing off their 4K Basic interpreter for the Altair 8800. My Altair didn't have a paper tape reader, so I was never able to verify that the the tape actually contained a copy of Altair Basic. Howard Turetzky PS. Stupidest career move ever...I was a working programmer at the time. A smart person would have given his business card to Mr. Gates in case he was hiring. Being not so smart is why I'm still coding away in an office at the IBM site in Boulder. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
