I know that there are one of two here who might find this interesting and who may have suggestions of their own. I haven't included abacusses, tabulators (with a hat tip to Martin Hollerith) and so on and have arbitrarily started after the Second World war thus excluding pioneers from all over the world including luminaries such as Luigi Federico Menabrea, Joseph Marie Jacquard, Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace (whose name graced the computer language I used to program in) and so many others including the Polish bombas and Turing et al's bombes, Von Neumann and so on.
Being an Anglophile I would like to start with the Manchester Mark 1.
System 7, a machine for the "real time wallahs" in industrial control with most of the development occurring on a System 360 and the binary object code being transferred to System 7.
I did some similar analog system control (hydro lab) monitoring work in 6502 assembler on a 64 KB BBC micro linked by UART port to an IBM AS/400.
System 7, a machine for the "real time wallahs" in industrial control with most of the development occurring on a System 360 and the binary object code being transferred to System 7.
Host Program Preparation Facility, HPPF, for the S/7 was available on the IBM S/360 and IBM 1800.
Program Prep could be done on a S/7 if it had sufficient memory and a disk drive.
Program preparation was often a much bigger task than the application that the S/7 was bought to do.
Program compilation and Link Editing are both intensive tasks.
Re: Historical computers...
Posted: Sun Oct 04, 2020 6:36 pm
by TheGreenGoblin
Those IBM series history videos are superb.
Fro the who want to live the halcyon IBM System/370 years there is the Hecules emulator...
System 7, a machine for the "real time wallahs" in industrial control with most of the development occurring on a System 360 and the binary object code being transferred to System 7.
Host Program Preparation Facility, HPPF, for the S/7 was available on the IBM S/360 and IBM 1800.
Program Prep could be done on a S/7 if it had sufficient memory and a disk drive.
Program preparation was often a much bigger task than the application that the S/7 was bought to do.
Program compilation and Link Editing are both intensive tasks.
Talk of the IBM System 7 brought to mind the IBM System 1 which in turn brought to mind Don Estridge RIP
I still have my E6B Dead Reckoning Navigational Computer mark 4. Made by the London Name Plate Manufacturing Company.
Well, It's labelled Computer, so it must be one !
Tis a mechanical analogue computer tis true.
Re: Historical computers...
Posted: Sun Oct 04, 2020 10:06 pm
by jimtherev
Harwell had a LEO - or something very close to one - and my then fiancée wrote programs for it in '58 or '59 it must have been. Being low-priority - fast breeder reactors were still a bit in the future - she could only get machine time after 22:00, so we used to schlep in together for a few hours whilst the programs ran. Nice and quiet & not much to do - well, not computing, anyway.
Eventually skirted staff were banned from the computer suite: the fashion was then for wide-skirted 'frocks' with lots of petticoats, and so much static electricity was there that the machine frequently crashed. (Crashed quite often without human interference, for that matter) And so, since she was of the persuasion which would not wear trousers, our happy midnight hours ceased.
Other abiding memory was the ferrite core store - all 16k of it - which occupied a portable building about 20 ft by 10 ft.
