Old time computer experience

[WA6UBJ]

For any of you OM's ( and I DO mean old  ) that may have been familiar with the Plato system based out of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana back in the 70's or 80's, check out www.cyber1.org, request a login (free) and experience once again what is was like to be on the predecessor to the Internet.  Back then there was a pretty active ham group and
some of you may have been active.  Even if you don't know about Plato, you might find it interesting.  Terminal units back then used plasma panels with a grid of 512 x 512 and the
current version duplicates the original system in every way I've seen.

Just a trip down memory lane....

Dick....

[Opcom]

plasma displays..

http://plato.filmteknik.com/
http://plato.filmteknik.com/

I wonder if this is the same kind in a military box. There could not have been very many plasma displays in the day:
http://www.bunkerofdoom.com/computers/univac/1562/100_1647.jpg

[NE4AM]

Gorsh.  That brings back memories.  I was at UI Shampoo-Banana from '80 to '84 during PLATO's heyday.  I could never get onto the PLATO terminals from all the gamer geeks parked in front of them playing Avatar, a 'D&D' derivative.  So I spent my time at Cochrane's bar, playing pinball instead.  Wednesday night special - Little Kings, 3/$1.  REO Speedwagon in the jukebox.  Chicks in poofy hair and leg warmers.  Dang, I wish I was 21 again.

[W3SLK]

Dave said:

Gorsh.  That brings back memories.  I was at UI Shampoo-Banana from '80 to '84 during PLATO's heyday.  I could never get onto the PLATO terminals from all the gamer geeks parked in front of them playing Avatar, a 'D&D' derivative.

Yow! I remember those days. The thing that throws me back is the CDC stuff. Our Sperry Univacs didn't have enough memory, (only 32K 4-wire core), we used what was called an ECMU, Extended Core Memory Unit (a whopping 256K). Later when I got out of the USN, I remember working there at NASA Langley Research Center, where there was row upon row of CDC disk drives. The neatest thing was when we got the Silicon Graphics 2400T, 2500T and 3300. Running flight simulator was part of the memory maintenance routine 

[AF9J]

You had to mention that stuff didn't you?  Oh man that brings back memories.  The Univ. of WI 1984-1987 (I did my Freshman and Sophomore years at a junior college).  Lesee:

1. Vax 11/780s writing Fortran 77 programs AND Having to wait a half hour for the programs to compile, because the system could barely handle the 30 people on it at any one time.  I'd read a book.  Others would play cards.  The worst part of it - after all of that waiting, finding out you'd screwed up with the syntax, and the program wouldn't run!  Ugh!

3.  The Gould Powernode computer that ran Unix.  It was one of the fastest machines in the CompSci building in 1985 - until it nuked its CPU.  One thing about Unix - it sure is fast, but with all of its hotkeys, it sure isn't user friendly.  I was reminded of this the hard way, when I acccidentally (via hot keying) erased ALL of the code I'd spent an hour entering in.  Grrrrr!

3. IBM PC ATs in the Engineeering computer lab in '87.  We used them for our design projects, and thought they had bigtime memory and capability for a PC.  Nowadays, you couldn't give them away.

73,
Ellen - AF9J

[NE4AM]

Of course my Dad tells me stories about ILLIAC, U of I's big vacuum tube computer, 5 tons, 2800 tubes.  Pretty STRAPPIN', huh?  Evidently PLATO was first developed for the ILLIAC I.  In homage, I called the Z-80 machine I designed as a senior project, the Illinois Puny Integrated Circuit Amateur Computer - IPICAC

Youse a REAL buzzardly OT if you had experience with ILLIAC. 

http://ems.music.uiuc.edu/history/illiac.html 

[W3SLK]

Dave said:

I called the Z-80 machine I designed as a senior project, the Illinois Puny Integrated Circuit Amateur Computer - IPICAC

Made you want to hurl.....no wait a minute, that was Epicac 

[w8khk]

All this stuff is so modern!   I remember cutting my teeth in 1963 on an IBM 1401 with 4 K of core.  Not 4096 bytes, but only 4000 the way they counted it back then.  Had a card reader, punch and printer.   No disk or tape.  To compile autocoder (similar to assembler) you had to read the compiler cards followed by the source deck.  It punched out an intermediate deck of "pre-compiled" code - symbol tables, etc...   Then you load a post compiler deck followed by the punched precomp deck, and it would punch out an executable deck - assuming no source errors.  Then you load that program deck followed by your data cards, and the printer would print your report.

I remember some of the fun programs from the IBM developers that had too much time on their hands... One would play "She'll be comin round the mountain" by printing gibberish on the chain/train printer, the different tones produced by various character combinations of the print hammers.   Another trick they did was to put the code in various sized loops, and you could hear the "song" if you place an AM radio near the core memory - if the CPU covers were opened. 

Had to wait for the 1410 computer with 40k core memory in 1965 for tapes, then later disks on the 360. 

[ka3zlr]

I always Liked Easycoder...then Fortran....Cobol was a little more readable....

[WQ9E]

My first interaction with a mainframe was in a Fortran class in college in 1979, the class still used punch cards.  The problem was that the punch machine had a backspace but if you backspaced and retyped then you had too many holes in the column which would shut the card reader down when you fed it your stack of cards.  I unfortunately found this out via experience when during the first week of class I shut the reader down with my puny little stack of cards while upperclassmen behind me clutching their very large stacks of cards stood and glared-that was a mistake I NEVER repeated.

I spent a couple of years with ComputerLand while doing my MBA and I remember that our local speed test for new PC's was how quickly they could regenerate the fire hose nozzle drawing in Autocad.  This seemed more logical than the Norton speed test which tested processor speed by executing the No Op instruction and measuring how many times this could be completed in a specified period of time thus giving people bragging rights that "my PC can do nothing twice as fast as your PC can do nothing".  As I recall the original 4 megahertz 8088's in the IBM-PC without the floating point co-processor took over a minute.  A couple of years later the ATT 6300 plus with a fairly fast 80286 cut that down to a very few seconds.  A company (can't recall the name) sold a dedicated cad system that used a Vax 11/780 and that would do the nozzle drawing several times per second. If you remember the original Bernoulli Box external storage they gave a new meaning to VLSI (very large scale integration).  A couple of their custom IC's approached 807's in size.  Biggest headache award goes to IBM due to the hard drive used in their new PC-AT, CMI manufactured as I recalled.  It was one of the first that used the "voice coil" positioner  for the flying heads and it would typically work only over a very narrow temperature range after a few weeks of usage.

It appears there is something of a market for the older boat anchor computers but I have enough bad memories of those I don't think that is something I will ever want to collect.  But I guess there was a spirit of modification back then that would have been in keeping with the old amateur radio style of experimentation.  The funniest modification I can remember is when an attorney brought in one of the original IBM PC's with the 65 watt power supply to which he had added a hard drive.  To make it work, he had drilled a hole in the cover over the hard drive and he used a pencil to spin the external flywheel of the drive as he applied power so the supply wouldn't shut down due to an excessive start-up draw.  I convinced him that the then replacement XT power supply price (about $200 then) was well worth it.

Rodger WQ9E

[John K5PRO]

NE4AM,
Gadzooks, little kings 3/1$. I forgot about those. Must be an Illinois thing, as the YL I was shacking with in Quincy loved em. I was there in 80-85, went over to Champaign-Urbana once or twice to see what a college town was like in the otherwise dead western IL.

My first experience with confusers was at VA Tech where they had these little suitcase labs, using 8080. We had to assemble programs to run on them. Then there was the IBM 370 with the decks of cards, waiting for batches to run. I was happy when Glass Teletypes showed up. 

[N3DRB The Derb]

I had a lab full of xt's with 10 MB HDD's on them. 80286 was not out yet.

Fun time to be alive. I witnessed the birth of computing at both jobs and home pre internet, then the WWW.

like being around in 1920 and watching bc radio come on the scene. history is almost never history when you are living it daY o daY. You look back years late an realize you were there to see it all.

[W3SLK]

Rodger said:

If you remember the original Bernoulli Box external storage they gave a new meaning to VLSI (very large scale integration).

Ha, ha!! I remember working on those Bernoulli boxes. Standard operating fare at NASA. The XT's, AT's, Macs, Mac+'s Mac II. The AT's had two different bios at the time. The standard would only let you use a 20MB hard drive. The upgraded version would let you go to 30MB. We had all kinds of problems at NASA. The Phd's would order a standard AT with a 30MB Seagate and expect it to work. It took a long time ironing out those bugs What a neat time and place to work. Vax/PDP-11, Silicon Graphics all new cutting edge stuff. BTW, the computer I was taught on in US Navy A school was the Sperry Univac AN/UYK-20(v). It was originally built in 1972 and used large scale integration. Since microprocessors weren't made then due to the metallurgy, they used micropressor emulators, 4 4-bit ROMS ran micro-instructions to complete the macro stuff. Man I loved the machine language end of this stuff

[W3RSW]

Yeah memories.
Fortran IVG, Marietta College, 1963/4.  Only computer available to college and in the Ohio Valley was at the DuPont plant.  IBM w/64k? mag. core memory.  We wrote programs on those 80 column cards and were lucky to get one run per semester.  Most were graded by a programmer and never run on a machine. Our class took a big tour and found that a set of compliler cards including the programming language before the actual data cards had to be placed in the bin.  whew. 

First PC I had was a Sinclair kit; $100. 4k memory too!  16k add on later.  Amazing. Never could get the tape recorder to remember a program.  Everything re-written everytime but what fun!

[K3ZS]

I got my start in the 70's working with Data General Nova and DEC PDP type computers.   We actually fixed the cpu boards of Nova computers down to the IC level.    At the time we ran diagnostics off of paper tape fed through a reader an a Teletype ASR 33, which also served as the main terminal.    When the diagnostic failed, you could loop it and scope the problem down to an IC or bad trace.    The boards were two sided, once they went to multiple layers, then board swapping became the way to fix them.    The Nova 2's we had had 64K of core memory.   Someone actually built these by hand using a zillion little ferrite cores with a criss-cross of wires running through each one.   The basic CPU clock rate was a blazing 5 MHz, which was lowered on an CPU instruction basis as needed.   These things were very expensive so, to me, it was a privilege to be sent to the various courses and learned to work on them.    The hardware experience helped me out in the future when I later developed DSP software for Doppler radar.    This was foreign to the computer science types who never had experience with hardware and couldn't relate to hardware issues such as timing and multiprocessing.

[Todd, KA1KAQ]

First one I got to molest was in the mid-70s, a HP-something, we called it Hewey. Ran programs from a front-loading cassette tape, single line amber screen, big role of that heat-activated paper in top. All in one, what a concept. My programming career was briefly interrupted early on when I discovered in BASIC:

10: PRINT [Insert cheeky phrase here]
20: GOTO 10

Anything 'computer' then was pure magic to most folks. Was a great way to impress your girlfriend that you really meant it, whatever 'it' happened to be. At least until the instructor noticed the paper usage issue....

Been doing the mainframe thing now since the 90s, they had just transitioned from a system with a chiller when I arrived. And those big disk drives with the twist-top containers full of 33 1/3 LPs.    We run a IBM Z9 now with mirrored EMC 8530 DASD boxes. It's like a comparing a laptop to a desktop against what we had in '96.   

Looking for work in said field isn't terribly fruitful. Several hits in the NC Research Triangle area looked promising until I got down to the part that said '...to help transition all operations from mainframe to...'. Ah, well....there's always Amway...

[NE4AM]

I just stumbled on the Multilabs website - they sell a 'Retrocomputer', a single-board BASIC interpreter with 32k of non-volatile RAM, PS/2 keyboarc connector, VGA output.  $99, its almost tempting to see how many of my old TRS-80 games I can run on it.