On Aug 25, 2012, at 20:10 , John Sessoms wrote: > From: "Daniel J. Matyola" > >> My first computer was an Apple ][. Great computer. I loved it. I >> learned Basic, Pascal, Assembler and even a bit of machine language >> programing on it. It certainly wasn't "plug -and-play," but it was >> designed for computer hobbyists, and most of them loved it. >> >> Dan Matyola > > My "first" computer was an IBM System 360. I learned to place the cards in > the card reader "Face down & nine edge first, AND DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING ELSE > KID!"
Not that you owned John! Where I worked 1975 to 1988 we had 6 IBM 360s. Not mine, but there they were. In the early 90's they were replaced by 3 IBM 3090s. Lord knows what they use now. For my departments equipment to be controlled by those beasts, the 360s, we had to program a PDP-11 switch panel, telling it to read a box of 80 col cards which then printed a paper tape which we ran through the reader which in turn told the PDP-11 to read a data cassette tape, which loaded the data telling it (PDP-11) it had a 9" reel to reel it could run to set itself up to accept the communications coming from the 360s and what to do with that data. The data was digital imagery coming into the building from the high frequency dishes out back that was being sent by one of two or three KH-11 satellites via repeating satellites that bounces the signals off stations in, for one, Alice Springs, AUS. The 360's decoded the security the data stream was encoded with, then split the data into four synched streams, each one writing one forth of each frame to one of four Laser Image Reconstructors (LIR) which used a 5 watt green laser beam hitting a chunk of some stressed out stuff that controlled the brightness of that beam that hit one of the sides of a 48 facet crystal 56,000 rpm air supported spinner which wrote the data one line at a time, 2780 lines per inch onto Kodak B&W super film (had no name, just WOW!) as it ran though the machine. 150 feet of film was exposed in almost satellite-link real time by each of the four LIRs. We had no hard drives yet, so we dealt in real-time with a backup of eight 70mm, 48 track, 4400 feet of tape wound on Pyrex glass reels spinning at incredible speeds to capture the data from a 15 to 35 minute pass. Only four tape recorders were needed for full resolution capture, the other four were recording only one in seven bits, for later satellite distribution to our allies in Britain, France, Canada, Australia, etc., as well as to the troops in the field who manned trailers capable of receiving, exposing, and processing the images (project ITACLES). The full res. stuff would be hand delivered within 6 hours, if troops anywhere in the world needed the better res., in vacuum sealed 24" by 10" packages. Our Allies never saw that film. It was TS TK NOFORN. By the time I left there, technology had advanced to the point where the IBM 3090s fed the data directly to a single LIR capable of writing the entire pass to film. This saved us lots of time. The previous setup needed machines that could read the barcodes on the films, cut the quarters of images out, then sonically weld them together using a horn shaped uhf feed to melt the edges of the pieces of film after they were cut, overlapped by a sixteenth of an inch, and pressed together. Flapping and slicing and sscreeeeeeeeee four times and you had a full frame image. Good times! -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
