Klarinet Archive - Posting 000045.txt from 2012/02

From: "Ray Whitmore" <ray@-----.com>
Subj: Re: [kl] IBM 1620
Date: Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:27:38 -0500

I also was introduced to programming on an IBM 1620. It was donated to my
alma mater, Union College, by GE and was open to all Electrical Engineering
majors. My wife and I spent many an evening punching cards on an 026 key
punch. Then we had to put them in the hopper and feed them into the computer
without dropping the deck of several hundred cards. Late at night, we did
that more than once!

I remember the most interesting fact about the 1620 was that it did math
calculations in decimal rather than octal or hexadecimal. And it even had to
be taught how to add. You loaded the addition tables as part of your program
each time.

After graduation, I was hired by United Aircraft (now UTC) who had DEC
PDP-8s in our department. We had to load all the programs and data from an
8-hole punched paper tape (7-bit ASCII plus parity) on an ASR-33 teletype at
10 characters per second. When we got a 150 cps "high-speed" reader, we
thought we'd died and went to heaven!

Ah, the good old days in the mid-1960s.

Ray S Whitmore
Senior Application Engineer
COmputer COnsulting Associates
A member of the Datamat Group
730 Hebron Avenue
PO Box 342
Glastonbury, CT 06033
860.657.2210
ray@-----.com
www.datamat.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Diego Casadei [mailto:casadei.diego@-----.com]
Sent: Thursday, February 02, 2012 11:39 AM
To: The Klarinet Mailing List
Subject: Re: [kl] IBM 1620

Wow guys! This thread is a lot off-topic but I enjoy it really a lot.
Dan, would you consider remaining subscribed at least for this kind of
messages? :-) Cheers, Diego

Oliver Seely wrote:
>
> Yes indeed, Keith. The memory wafts away in little bits, doesn't it.
Your post offered an abrupt reminder that we later had 9-track magnetic tape
units, but that the paper tape was indeed 8-track.
>
> Oliver
>
>> From: keith.bowen@-----.com
>> To: klarinet@-----.com
>> Date: Thu, 2 Feb 2012 15:58:17 +0000
>> Subject: Re: [kl] IBM 1620
>>
>> Agreed Oliver. I too used to be able to read paper tape (in my case 8
hole)
>> without bothering to run it through a printer! Punch cards ... thought
I'd
>> died and gone to heaven!
>>
>> Keith
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Oliver Seely [mailto:oseely@-----.com]
>> Sent: 02 February 2012 15:57
>> To: klarinet list
>> Subject: Re: [kl] IBM 1620
>>
>>
>> Oh yeah? How about the vacuum tube ILLIAC I where I had to punch
programs
>> on 9-track paper tape in one room and feed them through the reader in
>> another, with a tech standing at the other corner to catch and wrap the
>> program tape as it shot out of the reader. And how the filament voltage
was
>> set at 70% of normal during the day but raised to 100% after 5pm when a
>> utility was run to locate all of the bad tubes.
>>
>> You guys are kids! 8-)
>>
>> Oliver
>>
>>> Date: Thu, 2 Feb 2012 08:23:05 -0500
>>> To: klarinet@-----.com
>>> From: gkidder@-----.org
>>> Subject: [kl] IBM 1620
>>>
>>> My goodness, yourself! That sure does take me back. I first started
into
>>
>>> computers at the old Biophysics Laboratory at Harvard Med. School as a
>>> young post-doc in (I think) 1963, and remember that beast well.
>>>
>>> For the benefit of those who missed this experience: To write a
program,
>>> you first cut a bunch of key-punch cards, and loaded them into the card
>>> reader along with the first-pass compiler. This produced a stack of
>>> intermediate cards, which were loaded into the reader along with the
>>> second-stage compiler deck. Then, and only then, would it cough and say
>>> "mixed mode", a common error caused (simplified version) by using a
>>> variable name beginning with i, j, k, l, m, or n for a real (as opposed
to
>>
>>> an integer) number. Or vice-versa. The amount of hard language this
>>> produced had to be experienced!
>>>
>>> I don't remember using Leeson's material, but it's been a long time now.
>> I
>>> never stopped using computers as aids to my work, but it sure got easier
>>> and cheaper.
>>>
>>> George
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> At 06:46 PM 2/1/2012, you wrote:
>>>> My goodness. How did you ever get hold of that
>>>> film? I was the producer and it was made for the
>>>> 25th anniversary of the introduction of FORTRAN
>>>> somewhere around 1980. If anything can be credited
>>>> for bringing about the beginning of the computer
>>>> revolution, it was FORTRAN. I don't know if
>>>> anyone uses it today, but it was a cash cow in the
>>>> 1950s, 60s, and early 70s, and without it, the
>>>> introduction of large scale computers (which led
>>>> Jobs to the personal computers) would have been
>>>> delayed enormously.
>>>>
>>>> Dan Leeson
>>>> email: dnleeson@-----.net
>>>> alternate email: leesondaniel899@-----.net
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: Mark Charette [mailto:charette@-----.org]
>>>>
>>>> Sent: Wednesday, February 01, 2012 1:23 PM
>>>> To: The Klarinet Mailing List
>>>> Subject: Re: [kl] Saying goodbye
>>>>
>>>> I never met Dan, yet I had read some of his early
>>>> work ...
>>>>
>>>> Basic programming concepts and the IBM 1620
>>>> computer
>>>>
>>>> and seen his movie
>>>>
>>>> http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTR
>>>> AN/video/FORTRAN-1982.wmv
>>>>
>>>> way before I knew he was interested in clarinets.
>>>>
>>>> Software programming, movies, and the clarinet.
>>>>
>>>> What a guy!
>>>>
>>>> Mark C.
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>>
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>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>
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>
> _______________________________________________
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--

Diego Casadei
__________________________________________________________
Physics Department, CERN
New York University bld. 32, S-A19
4 Washington Place 1211 Geneve 23
New York, NY 10003 Mailbox J28310
USA Switzerland
office: +1-212-998-7675 office: +41-22-767-6809
mobile: +39-347-1460488 mobile: +41-76-213-5376
http://cern.ch/casadei/ Diego.Casadei@-----.ch
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