[Elecraft] Now that we know

[Douglas Westover]

Jeeez, all you guys are just kids! I cut my teeth on an IBM 650 as a
Stanford undergrad. OS??? Listen, we entered the boot program
through the front panel "switch register". The 650 occupied three
large  cabinets in a heavily a/c'd room (it was GREAT in the summer!).
2000 10 digit "words", plus sign, of drum memory with an incredible
96 ms add time! Languages? Well there was SOAP, IT and the
state-of-the-art FORTRANSIT, which, of course was built on top
of IT....a very crude early attempt at FORTRAN! SOAP was an
assembler that placed instructions on the drum in an optimum
fashion to overcome the drum latency.

>From the 650 Stanford "upgraded" to a Buroughs 220 which had
10k decimal words of CORE memory! Also tape drives! BALGOL
(Burough's dialect of ALGOL) was the language of choice though
assembler was still heavily used for those of us who needed real
efficiency. Dick Hamming was at Stanford at this time and chatting
with him while waiting for output taught me more math and numerical
techniques than I had ever learned in the classroom.

We also had a (one of 3 built) IBM 797 which was essentially a 650
with core memory and was plug board programmed with a 402 printer
plug board!

Of course we went through the 7090, B5000 and 360 series. At that point
I decided that my interest in computing/radio/electronics got me into
real-time computing with HP-2100 series mini computers. I worked
for the Stanford Radio Science Lab (and later SRI Remote Measurements
Lab) developing control , data acq and processing/display systems
for SRI's experimental/test bed OTH radar using single board computers
from Ziatech.

Man was that ever off topic!

I'll mention something "on topic". I saw a new Elecraft thing at the
DX Convention in Visalia. Wow!! You QRO guys, start saving your
pennies!

73,
Doug
W6JD

----- Original Message -----
From: "Kevin Rock" <kevinrock at earthlink.net>
To: "Robert McGwier" <rwmcgwier at comcast.net>; "Elecraft Mail"
<Elecraft at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Sunday, April 17, 2005 2:04 PM
Subject: Re: [Elecraft] Now that we know


> I never was a Vaxen.  I've worked with dozens of operating systems over
> the years but not that one.  I live in a cloistered world mostly writing
> my own software to go with the wire wrapped CPU and memory card kluge
> works I have as boxes :)  One day I may try VMS and see what I've been
> missing.  A break from the big three OSes is in order.  I find Lin/Mac/Win
> constricting.  There were other much better OSes in the early days of mini
> and micro computers.
>
> Kevin.   KD5ONS
>
>
> On Sun, 17 Apr 2005 20:49:52 +0000, Robert McGwier <rwmcgwier at comcast.net>
> wrote:
>
> > Now that we know I am an ancient computer person, I found a few links:
> >
> > http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=email+exploder&btnG=Google+Search
> >
> > Bob
> > N4HY
>
>
>
>
> --
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