The We Will Miss You, Chohole Complaint Thread
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and speaking of tools - one of my most important ones was this:
IBM Card Saw - used to hoks and saw stuck cards out of keypunch or other card handling equipment.. These were hard to come by and I certainly got good use out of mine cards were a lot more problematic at times - humidity was a big factor.
I still have it!
Seriously ... no of course not. It would have made for a challenge! Why we keep improving the computers ;-)
It would probably take a few months to do a simple 3DLight render! Or perhaps a mere B&W sketch type image! I wouldn't want to know how many cards it would take. Probably a roomful, every few days.
Dana
Well.. perhaps as ASCII art, but mainframes had no graphcs capability beyond text, way back when..
Ever wonder what was behind the computers in the back room?
Partial pic of the electrical room at one of our datacentres back in the day.
Most of the mainrames back then were water cooled, and the computrer rooms needed a good chilled air supply.. Part of the colling infrastructureL
and speaking of tapes...
What treasures our little laptops are eh! :-)
Water-cooled, eh? Well, well, we've come full circle, then! But, even the water pipes are much smaller! (and probably not really water? I don't know.)
Dana
Back in the late 60's, early '70s, usually, because of their expense, only the biggest machines had any sort of graphic output capability. Sure, any computer of the time could print pictures of Einstein or a pin-up girl using text on the printer. Looked great Scotchtaped to your dorm room wall, but real graphics as we know them, were rare.
HOWEVER, not to boast (c'mon, you know I love to tell this tale), but I started work at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in the early '70s and was the only programmer/operator/engineer assigned to the two Raytheon "mini"-computers in the "Special Measurements Division" (SMD) on the 2nd floor of the "Launch Control Center" (LCC), right next to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), the big boxy building where they assembled the Saturn-V rockets for the moon launches back in the '60s. Our group of techs & engineers were just the little guys in an outside corner room, doing non-launch related tests & research experiments. The really big computers for launch operations were in the huge computer room located in the entire central area of the LCC 2nd floor. During the moon launches in the '60s, the four alternative (two redundant rooms for each of two launch pads) Firing Rooms, i.e. the actual launch rooms on the 3rd floor (the ones you see in old photos, looking out the big louvered shutters facing the launchpad) had monochrome, text oriented monitors at the control consoles. But while I was there in the '70s, they also launched the last of the Saturn-V rockets to put the Skylab space station up. Then there were three launches of the smaller Saturn-1b to get the crews up to it. And I was also there for the launch of the Apollo/Soyuz mission. After that, the firing rooms were torn apart and they started installing new control consoles getting ready for Shuttle operations. Some of the early, new, control consoles that I saw, had color Ayden monitors with 21" circular displays (remember, it was near the end, but still in the era of the "roundie" color TV tubes). Later on after I left, they apparently switched to rectangular color monitors.
The Ayden monitors could display text in colors and I believe could draw lines using text based linear characters. But actually, I don't even know if they had true vector graphics or only used raster graphics, because I never got a chance to work with those particular models.
HOWEVER, in my little area, not worried about launch schedules or massive paperwork, and tight regulation, I was having a ball playing with my (two) monochrome vector graphics, Tektronics 4012 (slightly newer model of the 4010) storage display monitors. https://www.pdp8online.com/tek4010/tek4010.shtml A few times, launch people would come to us with a reel of analog recorded data and ask to get it analyzed, graphed and printed. The momentum, velocity, & acceleration forces on the plug-panel and dropweight in the Shuttle's Tail-Service-Mast (TSM) that retracted from its connection to the Shuttle's tail at the moment of launch by dropping a heavy weight and yanking the huge plug of plumbing and electronics from the both sides of the tail end of the Shuttle and slipping it behind a quickly closing door in the mast to keep it safe from the rocket exhaust that would be blasting at it seconds later, was one of the projects I worked on for them. (whew, long sentence, sorry
)
Shuttle Tail Service Mast is the gray rounded structure(s) on either side of the tail in the image below.
Regardless, my point is that not only did I have the Tektronics displays, but I also had a professional dot-matrix printer that I had linked to my computer so the vector image on the Tektronics could be converted by my computer to raster graphics and sent to my dot-matrix thermographic printer. The big room could probably have done it but I often had more time and could get the results to them quicker.
The downside to having such nice toys to play with was that there was absolutely zero software for them provided by my computer's manufacturer (Raytheon). I had to write all the drivers and graphics subroutines myself, as well as the floating point arithmetic routines too!
But I did, and I loved it. All of my real graphic work was with 2D maps & graphs, but I was playing with primitive 3D graphics in my spare time. Wheee...
But back to the topic, which was, I believe, graphics in the '70s. The highest resolution I had in my devices was 1024x768 on the Tektronics 4012 and similarly on the dot-matrix printer. To get to work on the color Aydens in the big room was my goal, but that never happened. I left the Space Center and went to work for a consulting company. Good career movement, but access to tax funded, super equipment was lacking for a few years until I joined the think-tank Mitre in Washington, DC in 1984.
HOWEVER, in the late '70s, while working a contract for Harris Intertype (newspaper machine division of Harris) I finally had an opportunity to program an Ayden color monitor. Unfortunately it was limited to text and text based linear graphic symbol operations for the control console of an electronic typesetting machine, so I never did get a chance to test out true color graphics on an Ayden. But it was a solid piece of '60/'70s technology with big well written manuals, and rugged hardware and hefty price tag. I loved it.
Ah, the good old days when computers were made of iron and could literally be used as boat anchors when they died.
Interesting YouTube about the LCC
Do you remember those aquarium lights that is a rotating image with a light? I got something more realistic that I need to clean it. It looks like a real aquarium with two goldfish. I got the tank at a store like Good Will, but a different company. I forgot what those are called.
"Ah, the good old days when computers were made of iron and could literally be used as boat anchors "
Heh, there was a surplus computer palce where we lived that called itself "Anchors Away" and on your Raytheons.. I thought we were advanced when we got a 3277 light pen (I still have one somewhere), but you got that beat..
But the first year I was at the KSC, we only had one of the Raytheons and it was really primitive when I first got there. They had one magnetic tape drive, a card reader a keypunch machine, and a high speed paper tape reader. But paper tape output was at 10 characters per second from an ASR33 Teletype. No hard drive! No high speed papertape punch. No high speed card punch. Programs were written by me, and punched to cards by me. Compiling a FORTRAN program required reading the compiler from magnetic tape (it was the only thing the mag tape was used for). The compiler needed several passes through the intermediate data all in 16KB of core memory of course (real magnetic donut cores, not DRAM).
Once compiled, the resulting assembler language output was sent out through the teletype to paper tape at 10 bytes/sec, which often took HOURS. Then I had to load the Assembler itself via high speed paper tape, then read the Assembler program translation back in via the high speed papertape reader, then punch out the resulting object binary code to paper tape again at 10 characters/sec. Once I had the all the necessary binary paper tapes, they were added to my physical library of gazillions of little rolls of paper tape in neatly labled little plastic drawers that represented various subroutines and libraries that had to all be loaded via the high speed paper tape reader into core memory to be executed. One or two programming errors would waste an entire day.
I got repremanded by the head of the department once because people in the hall could hear me cursing about my ineptitude or the recalcitrance of the machine.
By the 2nd year we had moved our lab to the LCC and added the other Raytheon (RDS-500) which was twice as fast, had twice as much memory, as well as proper hard drives, and didn't need papertape anymore. We also added a hard drive to the old Raytheon 706 but I had to write a driver for it.
By the time I left that job I had both machines doing proper FORTRAN compilations without needing any papertapes and I had both machines talking to each other via a serial port that I had to design and wirewrap the correct places on the motherboard pins as well as write the transmission protocol and the driver to implement it. So my first "network" was in about 1973 and had two machines in the network. Oh, those were fun days.
Cheer up ... in the rest of the world, we got reprimanded for whistling or humming while we worked. We were not to be happy at work and/or not to let anybody else working know that you were happy while working. Libraries are strange places.
Re: Paper tape - yeah - we had a setup like that for getting train movements and orders into the system - we had a large teletype room, and train data would be pucnhed out on paper tape,,then read in via a paper tape reader into the mainframe,. Working the teletype section was interesting, learnd a lot about swithcing networks , but boy was it noisy... As far as assembler programming - did some of that back in the day - mostly for MVS system exits
@ LeatherGryphon,
...wonderful story. Enjoyed the video of the LCC.
I started working with computers about 4 years after you left the KSC and by then there had been advancements (even though a mainframe and drives would still take up a large room) Teletype terminals, magnetic tape, punched cards, and punched tape still was around. When I started working with a Tektronix display it was like "wow" I could create 3D (monochrome) vector graphics and print them out on a pen plotter. A decade later I was working on IBM PCs and creating 2D 24bit colour images on a MAC II with PixelPaint.
Seeing the name Raytheon kind of got me to thinking about Misty again as I remember her speaking about working on stuff for them.
The high speed papertape reader that I had on that old Raytheon 706 had one major flaw. It had no takeup reel.
Yes, that's right, it had a place to hang a rolled up strip of tape as it unwound through the reader very swiftly, but the tape came out the other end of the read head and shot three feet horizontally then fell into a heaping mess on the floor.
Not so bad for little individual subroutine tapes, perhaps 3 or 4 feet long, but a big compiled FORTRAN output binary tape could be 50 feet long or more, and some of the libraries of collected subroutines all on one long tape were quite large too.
After a couple months of watching me hand roll 50-foot lengths of papertape, the manager of the department dropped off a handheld electric papertape winder. I was in heaven! Wheee...
I think it was my favorite special simple toy. I loved standing over the heaping pile of tape on the floor and slurping up the tape with my magic winder.
The next favorite simple toy has to be the little coin-like device of clear plastic with a brown magnetic fluid sandwiched in the middle of it. When you laid it down on a strip of half-inch magnetic tape, you could see the 7 (or 9) tracks on the tape. More importantly you could see the 1/2 in gap between data records. This was important for calibration purposes which had to be done now and then on the tape drive. That early tape drive would write either 7 or 9 tracks at three different data densities. At the lowest data density you could actually see and identify each individual recorded "bit". But at higher densities they were just a continuous blur along the track.
Okay, it's after the fact by years so hope you don't mind, but that's SO funny! No take-up reel. That would make a good animation skit.
...particularly right now as I'm listening to Scott Joplin's Elite Syncopations and can just see it as a soundtrack to a skit about using that tape winder.
Complaint: Time goes by too fast ,my youngest daughter is visiting from Florida ,and her visit is already half over .......
...yep that's the actual one I was listening after reading LG's post and then seeing yours..
This the paper tape I have.
...this is not looking much like your "Father's PC+ sale" aymore.
Tonight yet another bundle release that is the only item used to unlock special deals, deeper discounts, and freebies. Save for the extra small discount on new, PC+ for a day category and the extra freebie each week it seems more like a continuation last month's PA sale. Not been buying anywhere near as much as I have in years past, even compared to last year or this year's spring event. It's not only due to the "Budlemania", but many of the other specials like the B.YOB, Anniversary Megapack, and even PC+ For a Day seem a bit more heavier on old content that in some cases goes back to the Gen2 days.. This is the one sale event I usually look forward to every year, but it seems rather uninspiring so far.
Not a fan of the buy this to get that, especially when I don't want this but I do want that. So lots for the wishlist.
Daz checkout looks different?
we never had the tape reader gadget, but we did have tape developer fluid, same idea, an alcohol based suspemnsion of fine iron dust. DIp the tape, and then with a magifier, one could see the data stripes.. that gap you mention is called the "interblock gap" and as you say it fairly iportant.. Now heres a trick, if someone "accidentally" overwrote a bit of data on a tape - you cold recover a lot of it, by coding a read prtogram to bypass the new "end of data" label block, and read the bulk of the old data from the tape..
We also had a tape cleaner - it would remove loose oxide and them smotth the surface.. needless to say, you didn'y do this wait an "active" tape - scratch ones ony - This was usually done after the days EREP reports showed a tape with recoverable errors..
And your "heaps of paper tape on the floor" reminds me of what could happen with the old 1403 line printers. The page feed and advance was contrllled by a paper tape - the carriage control tape.. The printer was fed the old continuos fan fold paper, and iff the carraige control tape broke, the printer could easily spew an entire box of paper out the bakc and across the floor at quite an impressive rate..
1403 - carriage control tape..
1403 line printer - noisy buggers and another IBM product that had an oil bath.. note - ours did not whave wheels (gbad idea) and we had the full noise supression covers that enclosed the lower part of the printer
My experience with computer tape readers was a cassette tape drive for the Commodore 64! It took ages to load a program. We quickly bought a floppy drive!
Dana
Yeah, the 1403 printer was loud. We had one at my college along with an IBM 1130 computer, and 1442 card read/punch, one of those double disk cartridge storage system racks, and of course, the cartridge disk drive located in the right end of the console itself. We also had an off-line card sorter. The big square box in the back corner is the mystery box containing various IBM electroncs that we students were to never, never, touch.
Images below of a typical IBM1130 system, and a closeup of the 1442 card read/punch
card sorters.. the IBM 083 was a pretty decent machine for that work. One had to be very carefull stacking the cards in the input tray - or you might be greeted by the screech of a parially jammed card ripping itself to shreds as it went through.. Fun times!
IBM 1403 internals:
and the punch for creating its carriage control tapes..