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
