On Sunday 03 June 2007 13:43, Vince L wrote:
> > too many oldtimer, here :-)))
>
> Punched cards, anyone?
My first "official" computer related job (ca. 1970, I was 15) was
computer
operator on an IBM 360 mod44 (fully transistorized high speed number
crunching mainframe--- with 256K of main ram!). At the time there were only
11 of those models in the world. The one I worked on sat on the 2nd floor of
Upsher's Laboratories in Kansas City. That sucker had a high speed mag tape
reader, high speed yellow punched tape reader, and of course a turbo punched
card hopper. We eventually installed drive packs... with platters the size
of a large cake pan... and the drive units were the size of a washing
machine. The whole thing sat on a raised floor, required its own building
circuit... and was cooled by three air-conditioner units mounted on the roof.
The lab used the unit primarily to analyse electro-cardiograms from the
four-state area hospitals. The programming (I must have punched a zillion
cards in the early seventies...) was Fortran II / IV .... we had an entire
room of card cabinets. Oh, and the best part were all the blinking
lights... that thing had the primary registers "lit up" on the front panel...
selectable with a large wheel switch... and of course the stdout device was a
Selectric 1 console.
The last time I saw an IBM 360 mod44 was at the Chicago Museum of
Science and
Industry... in the IBM wing... behind a glass case. <sigh> That was the
machine that brought T.J. Watson Jr fame for saying, "from this point on we
will never make another computer with vacuum tubes!" And the second famous
quote when his son asked him what they were doing down at the lab... he said,
"I have no idea... but whatever it is they're doing it at 300,000 times per
second."
I still remember vividly about dreaming of a time when I might own my
own
computer ... and be able to do anything I could imagine with it...
--
Kind regards,
M Harris <><
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