Technology knows no bounds

My first computer was a very nice IBM 1130 minicomputer, that I was allowed to use for 1/2 hour each week. It executed instructions at 120K per second and only had 16 Kwords (32 Kbytes memory) It stored characters in 6 bit format.

My big upgrade at University was to go back 8 years to an IBM1620 computer - oh we had a state of the art 370 series M, but the only one I could use with impunity was a 55 KHz resistor-diode logic 1620 with 1.2 Mb hard drives with 7 - 16" platters - by punch card only. Fortran II and assembler. No floating point, no integer multiply.

Computing is nearly free. Memory is nearly free. Programming often crap, because very few know how to write efficient or maintainable code...
But somehow we still manage to build OSes with 200M lines of code.... go figure.

@davidpbest - I scrapped my PDP8i just 10 years ago. I even had an ASR33 to go with....

The truly great hybrid lathes out of Korea are astounding: The motor is built around the spindle, has absolute positioning and no gears whatsoever. The lead screw is completely electronic, and all feeds are by encoders. They can take CNC commands or do manual machining. I cannot afford to ask how much!
 
Dabbler said:
My first computer was a very nice IBM 1130 minicomputer, that I was allowed to use for 1/2 hour each week. It executed instructions at 120K per second and only had 16 Kwords (32 Kbytes memory) It stored characters in 6 bit format.
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Yea, I worked on the 1130 Disk Operating System (Core Load Builder and RPG compiler specifically) for IBM in 1967 when they ungraded the system with multiple hard drives and added some peripherals from the /360 line. Very familiar. The 1130 was a terrific machine.
 
Yep, I remember the old Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) PDP series computers. I remember when the university was getting ready to pitch their old PDP 8, and I strongly considered snagging it. I just couldn't convince my wife to give up the entire living room to house it.

My main focus was in the opposite direction, Altair 4004 and 8008, Kim1 (programmed by setting dip switches for the data and address buss, and pressing the WRITE button), etc. And yes, you had to write your own math libraries. The old BCD math libraries could be expanded to a crazy number of digits, but was slow. There were the invariable 6800, 8080, 6502 and Z80 design days. My first 1 Million Instructions Per Second computers was a Motorola 32032 processor single-board computer. It was a marvel. Of course, that million per second were "NOP" commands. The first computer I owned, which was assembled from the factory had two 4-bit processors (Tandy PC-1, and I still have it). The PC-1 had the distinction of having 24 DIGIT Binary Coded Decimal (BCD) math built in. They were beloved by NASA. A Decade later, they put out a call, to try to gobble up all that remained in people's hands. They were perfect for off-the-cuff space launch calculations. HP later came up with a "desktop computer" which had a silicon on sapphire math co-processor with matrix-math natively processed on it. It could invert a 256 by 256 array in less than 5 minutes, this was unheard of.

Back then, most of the early adopters of computers were not people with "programming degrees", they were Electrical Engineers (or high-end electronic Techs). The boss would say "we got this new thing, and it has transistors and chips, so I guess it is your problem". Those engineers and techs defined all of the common roots of programming we enjoy today. They were the masters of interfacing all kinds of things, to the newly harnessed processing power. There were a lot of custom buss computers, until finally much of the industry standardized to either the S100 buss, or the HPIB (later GPIB) buss.

My first hard drive was a whopping 5 Megs (not a typo). It ran in a Heath-Zenith computer. It was before the day of MFM and RLL controllers, it was custom and mated with the disk. My first floppy was a single sided single density full-height drive, about 160K of storage. It was mated to a 6502 processor running Rockwell Forth as a kernal OS and programming language (back then, they were not two separate things). There was no Disc operating system, it was block-read and block-write instructions.

Those were heady days, and most the engineers were doing things undreamed of just a year before. It was a different industry too, where great ideas were openly shared, instead of snatching up and patenting/copywriting ideas. Everyone wanted to see the industry grow. The industry was much like the Machinist groups still are today, with open sharing of ideas/tricks/gizmos which improved everyone's life.
 
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I was the first to get a PC at work here at the dealership.
It had a 1 gig hard drive. We were all very impressed with that. I think it had 256K ram.
It was around $2,000.
Times are changing fast.

I have fond memories of our family Apple II GS. My wife said we just had to have it???
All I ever did was help the kids play with the art stuff.
 
davidpbest said:
My first computer programming job (1966), the source code was fed into the computer (a Digital Equipment Corp. PDP-8) via paper tape on a Teletype ASR-33. It's truly astounding how things have advanced throughout my 50+ years in high tech. And stil, I look at the Norton gearbox on my PM-1340 lathe, or the J-head on my nearly new mill, and marvel at how some things have remained the same.

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First CNC mill I ever saw was a Bridgeport using a tape drive. Hot set up around 1972 if I recall. Fascinating to watch it do it's thing!
 
You guys are way older than I am, I only go back to the Commodore 64 with a cassette tape drive. No wonder you have better toys ;)

John
 
I started young. I was coding in FORTRAN IV when I was 14 (in the 60s) oh, yeah, I guess I *am* old! :(
 
Actually when I was in High school I started programming and building 8008 computers, long before the 6502 was thought of. I even did some code-for- hire on the 4004 and 8008 platforms. Boy, was the Zilog Z80 a big improvement!
 
It's interesting reading this thread. @Dabbler and I seem to have some early beginnings overlap. I took all the computer science classes taught in a single semester at University of Kansas in 1966 - consisting of "IBM 029 Keypunch Operations", "IBM 083 Card Sorter Operations", and "Fortran IV Programming on IBM 1130". Back then, if you wanted a job in the computer industry, you were not expected to have much actual education about computing, but instead were given a bunch of tests supposedly designed to assess your ability to reason, do basic logic, and look for "got ya's". I was very lucky to get in on the ground floor of the computer industry in the 1960's, crawled up the industry ladder at General Automation, IBM, Digital Equipment (DEC), Intel, and then into venture capital. Zero regrets, loads of war stories, but I am thankful to have "shop work" as a consistent avocation throughout. And yea, I too am old as dirt. :oops:
 
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