- --- On Fri, 10/3/08, Janet & Randy Brown <jananran_@_mymailstation.com> wrote:
> I wonder if a spare bedroom would hold a card punch and a
> reader and a sorter - not to mention the noise and the
> stress on the framework of the house. These things were
> MACHINES!
When I started college in June 1969, the school actually OWNED an IBM 1620 computer, which had its own card reader and punch. It was about the size of an office desk. It also had several off-line card punches, a card SORTER, and a machine that read cards and PRINTED their contents. The room was half the size of a regular classroom, and it was full. Over in the corner was a programmable electronic calculator from Wang Labs. It had one part on the table and another (bigger) underneath. Together, it weighed about 40 pounds. Most of the machines were noisy, either in themselves or because of their cooling fans.
> Not only did the cards carry the data (as we learned to
> call "information") but they held the programs as
> well. Oh, boy! The excitement and vocabulary lesson when
> someone carrying a stack of program cards dropped them!
5200 pick-up, as we called it. The sorter helped, if you could figure out which columns you wanted sorted and in what order - assuming you'd bothered to number the cards as the instructor had warned.
> And, remember -- not all nor everywhere was punch cards.
Yes, there was paper tape, magnetic tape, and something called magnetic core storage. The 1620 had something like 10K!
> Many of us spent untold hours shortening #2 Eberhards
> transcribing deathless "data" onto sheets which
> were . . . not faxed, but sent by company (Army, in my case)
> mail to someplace else, where someone else did something
> else with them (probably putting them on punchcard) while we
> went back out and did another yard check.
At work, we switched from IBM computers to Control Data, which used a different coding scheme for special characters. EVERY program had to go through a conversion program, so suddenly we had more than double the cards we had before: the IBM deck to use until the hardware was changed and the CDC deck to use afterward. If the data got updated, or new info was received, we had to change BOTH...
> The good ol' days . . .
NOT!
Gary R. Kazin
DL&W Milepost R35.7
Rockaway, New Jersey
The Erie Lackawanna Mailing List
http://EL-List.railfan.net/
To Unsubscribe: http://Lists.Railfan.net/erielackunsub.html
------------------------------
End of EL Mail List Digest V3 #2887
***********************************
This HTML page is © 2000-2009 Blue Moon Online System and The Railfan Network
This page and the data contained therein may not be reproduced
for any form of commercial use without the explicit permission
of J. Henry Priebe Jr. or his duly authorized agent.