flinn@seismo.UUCP (E. A. Flinn) (02/02/84)
The earliest computer I can remember seeing in action was a Card-Programmed Calculator at Columbia University. Input was from punched cards, and output was to punched cards, and since there was only one reader/punch, they had to insert blank cards into the program deck in the places where output was expected - and the right *number* of blank cards, too. Debugging a program must have been a nightmare. Does anyone remember anything cruder than this?
amigo2@ihuxq.UUCP (John Hobson) (02/03/84)
I wrote my very first program in September, 1966 at Stevens Institute of Technology (Hoboken, NJ) in a restricted version of FORTRAN II called FORGO (leading to obvious jokes about how one would gladly forgo fortran) to run on a machine called an IBM 1620. This fully transisterized computer had, as I recall, about 4K of memory, card input and output (you took the cards to an accounting machine nearby--plugboard programming--to get a listing) and did arithmetic by table look-up. I once had a program overflow memory, so I took it to the main computer, which was a UNIVAC 1105. The 1105 was a vacuum tube monster that ran hot, slow, and about 5-10% of the time would just lose your program somewhere. When they replaced the 1105 with an IBM 360, they quite literally couldn't give the 1105 away. John Hobson AT&T Bell Labs Naperville, IL (312) 979-0193 ihnp4!ihuxq!amigo2
wetcw@pyuxa.UUCP (T C Wheeler) (02/03/84)
Having had the dubious distinction of being one of the first 7 people in the Army (1956) to be given the title (MOS) of Computer Technician, I hesitate to relate some of those early horrors. Imagine a computer made up of 6 rows of bays, each bay being 7 feet high, 4 feet deep, and 30 feet long. Now imagine taking 2 hours each morning to just boot the rascal up. Imagine also a 20,000 volt cable feeding this animal. Further imagine that the rascal only had 4k of memory. It was great fun replacing all of those tubes and diodes every morning after you turned it on. Talk about heat, we could have melted the icecaps with the damn thing. Don't ask me the name, it was a secret project. It has long since been dismantled I guess, but they get ansy about those kind of things. By the way, we got to play with the very FIRST magnetic core memory. It was mounted in a plexiglass box about 12 inches on a side, and was mounted on a small table for all to see and marvel. It was also guarded by a Marine Major at all times. He was a friend so he let me marvel up close. There were some really interesting machines around in those days, most of them special purpose by current standards. Talk about patch cords? I still have nightmares about being trapped in a jungle of cords. T. C. Wheeler
mark@elsie.UUCP (02/03/84)
When I was in high school (circa 1965) I had a friend in the Psych Department at Colorado College. I used to help her and others there program a "computer" used for Operant Conditioning experiments on pidgins (you know, peck when the light comes on red for the third time and get a grain of food). The computer supported conditional branching, subroutines, etc., and it was programmed by *plug-wires*. I fell in love with it (high school nerds do that sort of thing). Imagine: the input was by hard wires; the output was by Carrier Pidgin! -- Mark J. Miller NIH/NCI/DCE/LEC UUCP: decvax!harpo!seismo!rlgvax!cvl!elsie!mark Phone: (301) 496-5688
colonel@sunybcs.UUCP (George Sicherman) (02/06/84)
Ah, it comes back to me now. My first computer was also an IBM 1620, and I wrote both FORTRAN and Assembly Language for it. It had 20K DIGITS (not words) of memory--10K bytes if the term is meaningful. Integers could have any length.
hakkinen@eosp1.UUCP (Markku Hakkinen) (02/07/84)
"Snap lead" wired programs are still being used by many animal learning psychologists to run experiments with pigeons and other animals. These set ups often resemble electronic Rube Goldberg contraptions and are frequently quite unpredictable, as the many relays and timers are sensitive to humidity, dust, and true bugs (ie., cockroaches and spiders.... animal labs are often dirty). My wife did her dissertation using this equipment and interfaced some more modern TTL integrated circuits to handle some sophisticated timing intervals (which would have taken several additional racks of relays and timers to implement). Unfortunately, the opening and closing of the hundred or so relays involved caused considerable interference and resulted in her having to shield the more modern technology from the old. As for other prehistoric computing devices, I cast my vote for the first personal/mini computer... the LINC. This system had, in addition to the keyboard, a set of potentiometers for input. I know of one that was still in daily use as of about a year ago. --Mark Hakkinen eosp!hakkinen Ergonomics Department Exxon Office Systems - Princeton
holmes@dalcs.UUCP (Ray Holmes) (02/08/84)
[] The machine I learned to program on was an "LGP-30" with 4K (24 bit) words of drum memory. The only language available was machine language (not assembler) though it was easy to learn as there were only 16 machine language instructions. The hardest part was learning the (now lost) art of optimising(sp?) drum accesses (NOT easy). I/O consisted of a terminal like thing called (I think) a flexowriter, and a "high speed" paper tape reader and punch (also many buttons & lights).
res@ihuxn.UUCP (Rich Strebendt) (02/10/84)
> The machine I learned to program on was an "LGP-30" with 4K > (24 bit) words of drum memory. The only language available was machine > language (not assembler) though it was easy to learn as there were > only 16 machine language instructions. The hardest part was learning > the (now lost) art of optimising(sp?) drum accesses (NOT easy). I/O > consisted of a terminal like thing called (I think) a flexowriter, and > a "high speed" paper tape reader and punch (also many buttons & lights). FANTASTIC --- someone else that worked with this fun machine! I once found a flier by an outfit that reconditioned these machines then sold them. A few quotes might be interesting/entertaining to the "younger generation" that has become jaded with computer power that fits on a desk-top. "Control Data [ours had a Royal-McBee nameplate] LGP-30 Low Cost, Desk Size Computer "The LGP-30 is compact and can be installed anywhere without special preparation. The computer is mounted on casters, can be freely moved from place to place, and is simply plugged into a convenient grounded outlet. "The LGP-30 is a stored program binary computer with a 4,096 word memory of 32 bits per word. It is the size of a standard office desk. The powerful but compact repertoire of 16 single-address instructions includes all basic arithmetic operations and logical decisions necessary to provide a broad capability, including alphanumeric input-output. ... Standard input-output equipment consists of a typewriter [actually, a Frieden Flexowriter] with standard keyboard, paper tape punch and paper tape reader. ... Optionally available is a high speed, 200 character-per-second photoelectric paper tape reader that completely loads memory in only 5 minutes. "Operation Times Access: 6 milliseconds minimum, 15 milliseconds maximum Transfer: 1 millisecond minimum, 15 milliseconds maximum Addition/Subtraction: 0.26 milliseconds, excluding access Multiplication/Division: 15 milliseconds, excluding access Physical Description Size: 26" deep by 33" high by 44" long, excluding typewriter and shelf Weight: 800 pounds Mounting: on sturdy casters Power Requirements Full: 1500 watts from 115-volt, single phase, 60-cycle supply Standby: 350 watts" This was taken from a flier or an advertisement copyrighted in 1968 by Mutual Computer Systems of Culver City, California. (No, I have not attempted to obtain permission to quote this material ... Is this company still in business?) Not mentioned in this description is the programming language that I used to program it. It was called the "24.2 Floating Point Interpretive System" and was about -><- that far above machine coding. The instructions consisted of a single character opcode and a 4 digit address, where the address 0000 completely changed the meaning of the opcode. For example: s2420 meant subtract the contents of location 2420 from the accumulator (which was a circulating track on the drum). The instruction s0000 meant take the sine function of the contents of the accumulator. It really was a fun machine to work with ... we discovered that the Blackjack program was cheating because it took it several seconds to search the deck for an Ace ... a perceptable delay in playing its next card! Rich Strebendt ...!ihnp4!ihuxn!res
rpw3@fortune.UUCP (02/11/84)
#R:ihuxq:-58400:fortune:6700030:000:4043 fortune!rpw3 Feb 11 00:13:00 1984 <Get out your W C Fields accents> "Ah, yezzzz... the LGP-30. I remember it well. Pesky little critter..." > The machine I learned to program on was an "LGP-30" with 4K > (24 bit) words of drum memory. The LGP-30 had 4K words, all right, but of 31 bits, not 24. It was really 32 bits per sector, but one was used to allow the write gate time to turn off. The accumulator, which constantly recirculated on the drum, actually had all 32 bits. (You had to know that, when you did input, 'cause you had to shift it over yourself.) There were only 15 bits of state in the whole machine (outside of the drum); each bit took up a whole card with 2 vacuum tubes on it. The this-state/next-state table was (literally) wired into a ROM made of discrete germanium diodes and resistors (zero and -20 volt logic levels), the equations of which were printed in four pages of the maintenance manual. > The only language available was machine > language (not assembler) though it was easy to learn as there were > only 16 machine language instructions. Not only that, but the low-order bits of the first letter of the opcode WAS the opcode value, and was what you typed when programming in "machine language". E.g., "Bring [load AC with] loc. 3054" = "b3054" = "13064". But there WERE other languages: JAZ, an interactive programmable desk calculator (with user-defined formulas, like "bs"); and ACT-III (ACT-3), sort of a FORTRAN 1 and 1/2. But you're right -- for the serious work you just loaded the I/O package, the floating-point routines, and the matrix algebra subroutines and coded the top level program in machine language. It was also MY first machine, and so I learned hexadecimal as being 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 f g j k q w Doesn't everybody know "all ones" is "wwwwwwwk"? (The 32nd "non-bit" was on the right.) And since the address field was not right-adjusted in the instruction word (it was two bits over), the 12-bit addresses (64 tracks of 64 sectors) were counted from 0-3wwj in fours ("zero, four, eight, jay, ten, fourteen eighteen, jayteen,..."). > The hardest part was learning > the (now lost) art of optimising(sp?) drum accesses (NOT easy). The difference between optimal and not was 7:1 performance. You either caught the operand before the next instruction or you missed it and lost a rev (nothing in between). Track 63 was reserved by convention as scratch for temp variables, since that way you could almost always find a sector that was optimal. Lost art? You should see how it helped my bit-slice coding! > I/O consisted of a terminal like thing called (I think) a flexowriter, and > a "high speed" paper tape reader and punch (also many buttons & lights). The PC, IR, and AC were displayed on an oscilloscope (!), neatly set into the front panel (recessed, sloped), with a little graticule mask over the scope with slots for the three traces to shine through (the slots had bit numbers screened under them), and hidden controls for height, width, etc. But (getting to the point of this old boy's tale), we created an interface that allowed up to 63 additional devices to appear on a parallel TTL bus outside the machine. The height of "Rube Goldberg" was to dump an accumulated NMR spectrum from a signal averager's "magtape" port via the TTL interface to the LGP-30, there to punch a 5-level paper tape, carry the tape to the PDP-9 in the other building, translate it to 8-level roll tape (the PDP-9 preferred fan-fold, but the next guy couldn't read it), carry it to the IBM 1620 for matched-filter curve-sharpening and plotting on a Calcomp plotter (interfaced as a card punch). Then you picked up the paper and carried it back to the NMR lab to compare it to what the spectrometer had printed out on it's plotter. I was almost sad when the PDP-10 came in and we wired it straight to the NMR machine. :-) Rob Warnock UUCP: {sri-unix,amd70,hpda,harpo,ihnp4,allegra}!fortune!rpw3 DDD: (415)595-8444 USPS: Fortune Systems Corp, 101 Twin Dolphins Drive, Redwood City, CA 94065
mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor) (02/12/84)
We used to program the LGP-30 in a language called ACT-5, which was
really quite a nice language for its time. Yes, optimizing the drum
accesses was fun. We developed special coding sheets for the purpose.
One of my favourite moments was when my optimized flexowriter output
routine finally managed to produce a uniform stream of characters instead
of the usual sequence of 5-character bursts. I even published it
in "Pool News"!
And no, it wasn't my first computer, but it was probably the slowest
I ever worked on.
--
Martin Taylor
{allegra,linus,ihnp4,uw-beaver,floyd,ubc-vision}!utzoo!dciem!mmthgp@abnjh.UUCP (H. Page) (02/14/84)
[] Talking 'bout the good old days, anyone out there ever have the privilege to work on an RPC-4000 manufactured by Royal-McBee, General Precision, or Control Data, depending on the day of the week? As I recall, this machine was the advanced model of the LGP-30, with more memory and a larger word length (8008 32bit words). But what I really miss was the oscilloscope used to display the contents of the registers! Also new(?) was a high level language - ACT 4. It worked, but a 100 line program took somewhere on the order of 10 minutes to compile! The company I was with had two machines, one was online while the other was being repaired. They were both retired in 1975. -- Also... When I attended The University of Colorado, the main computing center had 2 CDC 6400's (circa 1963(?)). From what I understand, the only reason they were replaced with a new CDC several years ago is because the maintenance cost were so high... Howard Page ATT-IS ..!abnjh!hgp
flinn@seismo.UUCP (E. A. Flinn) (02/21/84)
I forgot to mention that on the old Silliac, hexadecimal was 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 K S N J F L since that was the way the keys on the teletype were labelled.