Ferrari Mailing List: Re: Fortran and other antiquities

[Les Thompson (les21]

Back in my old Hughes Aircraft days, we had some Excellon circuit board drilling/routing machines controlled by General Automation computers. The early ones required the entry of the boot program by switches. Had a card with several rows of code. switch up or down, for a row of 16 (CRS on actual #) switches, enter, next row. If you did it without an error, you could load the paper boot tape. Then the machine could be run by loading the program tape for the circuit boards being processed.

We had a program tape that could be loaded and then a transistor radio held near the computer and you would get the William Tell Overture playing via the rfi from the computer.

Les T.

-----Original Message----- From: George Sent: Mar 11, 2015 5:02 AM To: Les Thompson Cc: The FerrariList Subject: [Ferrari] Fortran and other antiquities 

All this talk of Fortran, core memory, and ancient systems we all worked on in the past....  Oy, such memories. 

In high school (late 70's), the computer we had was a Wang "all in one" (and speaking of "full circle", Rick Lindsay!) - offline storage was via cassette tape.  We were *EXCITED* when they came and upgraded the RAM to - are you sitting down?? - *4K*!!  We thought that was enough memory to conquer the world! 

My college Fortran prof did his PHD thesis at MIT in Fortran.  Well, Pascal I think, but it was driven by a 7 line fortran routine.  A quarter million LOC - all on punched cards!  Better him than me, I say.... 

And speaking of punched cards, a story from another prof.  When he was in college, (probably my early college years, too), they got phone bills with punched cards.  So for the first month on campus, they made NO extraneous phone calls so they'd get the minimum bill possible.  They took the card to the computer lab and duped it.  Then they overpaid by $1.  The second month, same thing, no extra calls.  Then the bill came, they compared the cards and found the punch indicating a "credit" to their account.  Henceforth all cards were punched in that location and sent back to the phone company, sans payment.  heh heh.....   ;-) 

gp

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