Working Daze by John Zakour and Scott Roberts for January 27, 2022

Somewhere in my Collection-O-Junk is a computer primer that says in its preface: “The computer, which once took up an entire room, is now down to the size of a family refrigerator, and can hold up to sixty-four thousand bits of information. That’s right — sixty-four thousand!”

Yeah, one per truck.

Actually, if this going back to the days of ENIAC, it would have taken ALL those trucks and a veritable army of techs to install it.My first assignment after tech school in the Air Force was to an Automated Digital Information Network (AutoDIN) facility. It had a “state of the art” hard disc drive, the platter of which was close to 6 feet in diameter.

Hey… I worked on one of those… actually, several or them. Anyone remember Univac’s drum units? Or NCR’s CRAMs? Suddenly I feel Oooold!

Back in the late 60s… Training as a field service tech, my first system was a CDC 140A… 80 column punch card and paper tape input… No screen, just eight valve-tubes showing a numeric display… The memory was ferrite ring-bits you could actually see… Threading the copper wire through the rings was how you programmed it… 4k took up an entire wall… The AC unit trying to keep it cool was almost as big as the main-frame…

Back in August 1970 I went to work for Ma Bell. Five months later I was promoted into the Electronic Switching System #1. We didn’t have hard disks back then, semi-permanent memory was stored on 6.5"X11.5" aluminum cards with tiny magnets welded to it. Each card held 320 bytes of information. There were 9,216 cards duplicated in active/standby configuration. Ram or what we called “Call Store” held call processing info. There were a little over 50 frames that held a one cubic foot core of 8K memory. The CPU was about 8’w x 6’h x 1.5’d divided into three frames, again duplicated in active/standby.

How much of a throwback is this, really? Gotta be loooong before 2021.

My first computer program was in FORTRAN on punched cards for an IBM 1130 in 1970. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1130

I remember the days of the 80’s when during the interview they would take you on a tour of the IBM Mainframe computer room to see the tape drives spinning and the printer printing.

We had digital SONAR system serial#3. The video was stored and refreshed from a magnetic drum.

1967: IBM 360/65. Special air conditioning. I would write a program on a keypunch form, send it to the keypunch department, wait to get it back, submit it to the operator, wait for it to be run, discover a misprint in the code, write the correct command on a keypunch form, wait to get it back,…

bow do i remember those big things. you could only play pong

I really like this one, Scott. It’s humbling to see how far we’ve come. And now we’ve reached the stage where Moore’s law may no longer hold up.

I worked at a place that had one of the first IBM “portable” computers. I didn’t have to use it, just played with it a little (with supervision) when it wasn’t in use. The thing was the size of a suitcase, and weighed about as much as a fully loaded suitcase. It opened up to a keyboard and a tiny screen with orange characters. Don’t know how much memory it had, but likely not much. Must not have been real successful, never saw another one.

And now the computing power of your cell phone has more power than the computers in the Apollo spacecraft that went the moon. But not quite the power of the computers in Houston and definitely not the power of the significant figures backing up the computers.

Worked on an IBM octopus back in the day. Looks like it was about that size.

Now they have whole warehouses for servers.

I played my first computer “game” in 1974 on a teletype console. No vid…just a printout on paper. I mean, that was light years beyond 1955 and 1965 even 1970.

The first digital computer I got to play with was a Raytheon 703 at the flight simulator school at Chanute AFB in the mid 70’s. That was using rows of switches and lights on the front panel for I/O and a paper tape reader to load larger programs after we “fingered” in the boot loader program using the switches.

Of course, we had to get thru the entire analog computer training before we were allowed to play with the digital stuff. And I followed the same pattern after graduation, I worked on analog systems for a few years before moving on to digital.

I’ve seen my share of ASR 33’s, punch cards, paper tape, mag tape and drum drives. Sim troops were prone to practical jokes and my crew on a F-111 sim had fun with me one winter night. They emptied the bit bucket from a paper tape punch into my gloves. I kept finding bits in those gloves for quite a few weeks after that 8^)…

Best fun I ever had working for living…