[Elecraft] Now that we know

[EricJ]

 Jeeez, Doug, you're just a kid! I was a field engineer installing huge
vacuum tube analog computers (EAI 231R among others) all over the East Coast
and southern Canada. Customers included NASA, Pratt & Whitney, Perkin-Elmer
and just every Ivy League and Bush League university in that region.
Digital stuff was sort of interesting in a primitive way. We interfaced them
to analog computers to do the mundane number-crunching and flow control
chores while a couple of analog computers accomplished the heavy lifting. I
notice there is renewed interest in analog computing. Even with all the
gigawhiz CPU's out there, it is hard to beat them for differential
equations. They are also more intuitive to program for an engineer.

BTW, dug up a 650 simulator you might try. I haven't played with it yet, but
it might be interesting.

http://infinitefish.com/650/

Eric
KE6US

-----Original Message-----
From: elecraft-bounces at mailman.qth.net
[mailto:elecraft-bounces at mailman.qth.net] On Behalf Of Douglas Westover
Sent: Monday, April 18, 2005 11:34 AM
To: Robert McGwier; Elecraft Mail; Kevin Rock
Subject: Re: [Elecraft] Now that we know

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+Sear
> > ch
> >
> > Bob
> > N4HY
>
>
>
>
> --
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