----- Original Message -----
> Some years later (~1980), I ran into a reference to "tub memory". That
engendered quite a vision in my imagination. Does anyone know what that
might have referred to? Maybe it's a takeoff on (paging) drum. I never
met a drum device, either, but that must have been something to see the
innards of, itself. (..Carl?)
We had a 2 meg (!) drum drive for use as a aid to doing CTD casts (
Conductivity, Temp and Depth.)
It was a sealed unit driven by a 1850 rpm A/c motor.and it had a Rhodium
plated drum
It was mounted on the second deck in a dry airconditioned lab space.
Unfortunately the motor acted a a sort of gyroscope and wiped the read/write
heads out in a short period of time.
The drive cost about $8 K (1972) and was deemed SOTA.
Repair estimate was 3-4 K so we never got any use from it !
dee
..
I am surprised that it didn't boot from tape. How many cards were
required for that process. Booting is usually referred to as an
IPL, now (initial program load). A warm restart of any system, OS
or otherwise, is referred to as a "bounce".
To tell the truth, I don't recall the terminology -- it may indeed have
been IPL -- or maybe I just never ran into a proper discussion of what
was going on.
The card reader must have been memory-addressed, I suppose. I think the
initial deck was less than a few-hundred cards. There *were* multiple
instructions per card, but it still may not have been enough for a full
OS, so you may be right that there was a final load stage from tape.
Maybe not?
BTW, I have to correct my confusion re card columns in my post. The
cards were, of course, standard 80-column ("Hollerith") cards. For
Fortran, Cols 1-5 were for an (optional) statement number, column 6 was
the "continuation-column", cols 7-72 were for program statement text,
and cols 73-80 were for optional annotation use, typically card-deck
sequence.
Object decks used all(?) 80 columns for machine code. Maybe there was a
sort field, or maybe an explicit memory load address which would have
served the same purpose.
..
entertainment.
Card Jams... Sounds like an industrial, grunge band. Would they
play at a KPLUG meeting?
Hey, is that domain name taken?
..j
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