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Re: [ARSCLIST] Telemetry Tapes
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Richter" <mrichter@xxxxxxx>
> steven c wrote:
>
> > As a side comment...I recently re-found my FORTRAN textbook, c.1973.
> > It said "The new IBM 360 system can be equipped with as much as a full
> > megabyte of resident memory, though few of them are so equipped..."
>
> Somewhere I have the pictures I took of the blackboard as we learned 650
> machine language. We had no compiler, not even an assembler. Hand
> optimization of numeric op codes on the 4K drum memory was the way we
> learned to code.
>
> Things have changed a little since 1961.
>
I had my first tentative contact with (a very tentative) IT back in 1961!
I was working for a small insurance company, which had a "computer" to
calculate its premiums and print the notices. This took, all told, about
four large grey machines, one of which was "the computer" itself...and
that one was "programmed" by plugging a collection of jumpers (with banana
plugs at each end) into a board with a hundred or so holes. My task was
running 80-column "IBM cards" through a sorter as many times as there were
columns in the items to be sorted...and then taking the sorted cards,
placed in order in a large wheeled cart, over to the people who fed
them into "the computer" in carefully sorted order. On bad days, somebody
managed to knock the rack of sorted cards over en route...
However, I suspect that was a lot faster than the predecessor method of
using a handwritten ledger (which were still stored, as were all the cards,
in the basement of their building!) to manually type each premium notice...
...stevenc
http://users.interlinks.net/stevenc/