On Monday 26 June 2006 08:15 pm, James G. Sack (jim) wrote:
> James E. Henderson wrote:
> > boblq wrote:
> >> On Friday 23 June 2006 09:57 am, Nicholas Wheeler wrote:
> >>> PS: 7 years of Linux experience makes me a newbie. Ya'll must be grand
> >>> masters.
> >>
> >> Chuckle, my first work with computers was in 1962. The machine filled
> >> several rooms and was full of tubes.
> >> Carl goes back further. So I think does Jim Sack.
> >> So yes, you are a newbie. Sadly though, that does not make us grand
> >> masters,
> >> just "experienced." LOL.
> >> BobLQ
> >
> > Me too! I started in 1959 on a giant machine that used tubes, a
> > Burroughs 220. I remember that the mean time between failures was about
> > 15 minutes. It was slow and fussy, with a 4K mercury delay line memory
> > and punched card input/output.
>
> The winner!
>
> my story:
>
> I had a Heathkit analog computer (tubes) to play with about that time,
> but I guess that doesn't (er..) count. Also at that time, I suppose I
> might have gotten involved with an IBM 1620 in the EE dept, but I
> changed my major to physics.
>
> So it ends up my first real hands-on experience was about 1962 in
> grad-school on a GE-225. I used Fortran-II (aka card-fortran, it had the
> simple IF-statement -- no steenkin' else-branch needed).
>
> As I recall, the mainframe had 32K of 60-bit ram (core, or course).
> There were 2 6-ft tall tape drives for holding the fortran
> compiler,assembler, etc, and for building intermediate code products, I
> think. The final output was a card deck spit out by the nifty card
> punch. Then you added job control cards and your data deck at the end
> and the whole package was fed into a card reader right at the console.
>
> I believe the system was reputed to be something like a half or a
> million bucks. The main computer room was at least 1000 sq ft.
>
> I thought it was quite an honor when they allowed me to run my own
> programs as a sanctioned console operator on Saturdays. I had to
> open up, start the beast (bootstrapping from toggle-switch instructions
> that read and executed a card in the card reader. As I understood it
> that card had instructions to read the rest of the bootstrap code from
> the remaining cards in the reader. All of this is really not too far
> from what we do now, eh?
>
> My program decks, I could hold in one hand usually, but some guys had
> huge programs they carried around in multiple punchcard boxes (1000 each
> box?). There are many horror stories of programmers who neglected to use
> the (optional) card sequencing field in cols 81-90(?), and learned their
> lesson after one experience dropping their deck. You young'uns need to
> know that there were card sorting machines to put things back together.
> They were pretty nifty machines, too!, those card sorters. I believe in
> earlier days, they may have played a large role in the business machines
> industry.
>
> There was a wonderfully fast and noisy line printer, about the size of a
> mini-cooper (maybe just slightly less), which spent a large part of its
> time printing compiler error listings and coredumps -- when it wasn't
> being reloaded with paper.
>
> There was a job-control requirement for specifying max CPU time and
> printer output, so the cost of runaway programs was somewhat controlled.
>
> During normal operating hours, people submitted their job-decks and the
> operator spent all his time feeding decks into the reader, and servicing
> the printer. There may have been some programs or libraries that
> required loading special tapes, too. Card jams in the reader and punch
> provided additional entertainment.
>
> For trivia day, I'll tell about one cute little trick that made it
> easier to separate job output.
>
> The "jobname" from the jobcard was printed like an ascii "banner"
> program (ah, so that's where that term came from, you say), and it was
> arranged to print on two sequential pages, and the two pages each had
> printing that overlapped the perforations -- whereas normal output
> skipped ('to channel 1', double-score trivia points) the page boundary.
> "So what?", you say: the operator could look the edge of a foot-high
> stack of printout and see where each job started, because regardless of
> whether the previous one used an odd or even number of pages, _one_ of
> the printed perf-boundaries would always be visible. Then it was a
> simple matter of dividing at each such boundary, and delivering separate
> job output stacks to the output rack/table.
>
> Ahhh, for the good old days (not!).
>
> ..jim
Ok Here is a repost. No trimming here. If all us old farts post to this
thread and don't trim the last post will be a pretty interesting slice
of computer history.
Date: Tue Jul 12 13:10:41 2005
From: boblq <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
The Rice University Computer R1.
http://www.princeton.edu/~adam/R1/r1rpt.html
History, of a recent sort. But from the early days of computing,
the late 50's early 60's. I was an undergraduate EE at Rice where
I finally, after years of working construction every summer, (that is
real work, Andrew :) got a great summer job working on the Rice
University Research Computer, R1.
To give a flavor of this beast
<quote>
Since the R1 was built and maintained at Rice, it could be extraordinarily
responsive to users' needs. Monte Carlo circuitry was added to the machine
for Kilpatrick and Chesnut's work. Jean-Claude DeBremaeker added a digital
seismograph to the Rice Computer and a new tape mode to drive it. This
was made easy through the availability of Class 7 (Special Function)
Instructions
and through the mode lights. When a disagreement arose over the best way
to do something, such as how to best implement floating-point zeroes, the
mode lights were useful in effecting a compromise. This became a battle
between Graham and Kilpatrick: should a zero result in a floating point
calculation be represented as a zero mantissa with the original exponent,
to show the precision to which it was zero (Kilpatrick's sentiment), or should
it be represented as a zero mantissa with a zero exponent, so that it would
be represented by the machine as a "real" zero, identical to the contents
of the zero register (Graham's feeling)?[52] The arithmetic unit was wired
both ways and attached to a mode switch, allowing the user to choose
which way he wanted to run the machine.
</quote>
The "mode switch" was literally a physical switch back inside the
racks of the machine. When I was operating the machine I would go
back into the racks, take off one of the doors, flip the switch to the
appropriate setting, then go load the application program. The machine
had quite a few such switches. It was very easy to modify the instruction
set.
Both John Kilpatrick and Jean-Claude DeBremaeker were great guys
to be around. Here is a description of Kilpatrick by Robert Curl, who
was a student of Kilpatrick's and went on to win the Noble Pirze in
Chemistry for Fullerenes.
Marty Graham was my favorite prof. He went on to Berkeley and became
president of the ACM. He taught a course in electronic circuits, that
began, "A transistor is a three wire marble with gain." Then went on
to describe every possible effect that the most complex models would
describe. He brought clarity to even the most subtle of problems. He
co-authored, "High-Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic"
toward the end of his career. Also a very funny guy.
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/EE/Faculty.pages/graham.html
<quote>
It was not until my third year when I had John E. Kilpatrick for Physical
Chemistry that the chemistry department began to pull ahead in the
colorfulness race. John Kilpatrick came to class, sat in the middle of
the table in front, lit a cigarette, took an enormous drag, and began
to speak. No smoke came out! Richter, another prof, enlivened his
lectures by describing the pharmacological effects of various organic
chemicals. Kilpatrick was the most welcoming to students of any
person I ever encountered with absolutely no regard for the amount
of time he spent with a student. This, happily for him, made the time
he devoted self-limiting, because I would think about whether I had
an hour or two to spare before dropping by to see him.
</quote>
http://nobelprize.org/chemistry/laureates/1996/curl-autobio.html
I took a physical chemistry class from Curl and often saw Kilpatrick
in the computer "room", which was about the size of a small house
and the clodest place on campus in the summer. After working
construction for 6 or 7 years during the summers in south east
Texas, where 90-100 degree heat combines with 80-90 percent
humidity, this room was like heaven
R1 was very kool machine with an intriguing tagged 3 address
architecture. Still a decent model even today.
C <- OP A B
Read C is built by OP erating on A and B.
where OP erator was one of 256 possibilities.
A, B and C were tagged addresses, which could
be registers, direct or indirect, auto increment or
decrement.
Ed Fuestel descibes the architecture here.
http://www.feustel.us/Feustel & Associates/R2.pdf
You can do a lot with that architecture. It virtualizes, as
all good hardware does, one basic approach to computation.
The guys in the Rice Chemistry department, mostly Kilpatrick
and his students, did very complex quantum mechanical
computations on this old machine. Ernie Sibert, now a prof
at Syracuse, was just downright scary he was so bright.
You don't have to be sitting in a bathtub to say "Eureka!"
Ernest Sibert, Cis400-Ultrasparc Assembly
Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY
I guess my feelings for this machine are akin to what Stremler
feels for his beloved Amiga. In next to the iron, on one of
these machines, surprisingly powerful calculations could
be made. That despite a 1 Megahertz clock and a memory
configuration that consisted of 63 Radechon CRT tubes
forming an array of 8192 memory words.
Here is a picture of Joel Cyprus, one of the machines gurus.
This picture was taken in 1960. By the time I got to work
with the machine in 1963, Joel had gained at least 100 pounds
and was the shape of a pear. This picture show quite well
though his key chain from which hung his Phi Beta Kappa key.
A classic geek, beautiful guy, I wonder what happened to him?
http://www.princeton.edu/~adam/R1/cyprus.jpg
I spent many hours in essentially this same position, tracing
wires around the computer. My first job that summer of 1962
was to update the schematics, drafting the "as built' documents
for the entire machine. It was like walking around in a modern
microprocessor except that if you leaned over too far your
head would hit the B+ 250 volts (it was a tube machine) and
it would kick you back into the rack on the other side. One
time was more than enough.
Here is a more recent picture of Joel Cyprus, geek extrordinaire,
http://www-dsp.rice.edu/DSP30/pictures3.shtml
I guess he is alive and well in Houston.
So it goes,
boblq
--
[email protected]
http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
