[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

I like this game.....

**********************************************

IBM 650 Magnetic Drum

Now this was THE Storage Device for Data ****AND **** the instructions ****to be executed.....

I wrote a calculartion program for it ....

SOAP language (Assembler ) and...Fortran.

[Dr. Sivana]

This is starting to get ridiculous. Next someone will claim that he worked on an original Babbage Difference Engine.

[PapaBear3625]

The drum was before my time, but we heard stories about it. One story related to what happened when one unit experienced a bearing failure at a nearby college. The drum itself was a metal cylinder 4 inches in diameter and 16 inches long, spinning at 12,500 rpm. You can imagine the kinetic energy. The story had it that when the bearing failed, the drum came out of the housing, flew across the room, went THROUGH the wall, and embedded itself in the wall of the next room.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Not sure what all is in here:

IBM-- Storage photo album

IBM 1301 disk storage unit

The had TWO R/W heads

For all of the disks.....

[NVDave]

Well, in all fairness to those of us who starting using FORTRAN with -66... your FORTRAN was, what, FORTRAN-II or something?

I don’t think you even had named COMMON blocks back then....

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Ernest.

IBM announced on Thursday that its boffins managed to cut the physical requirements for a bit of data, whereby number of required atoms has been reduced from a million to only 12.

12? That's the best they can do? ;')

[Marine_Uncle]

The good old days Ernest, when we did neat stuff.

[Erasmus]

I worked as a maintenance trainee for IBM in Chicago's Loop when there were still a few of the tube computers/calculators at our customers.

I saw a 604, a couple 650's, and a 709--but never had to train to work on them.

Many of our customers were transitioning from exclusively punch card equipment directly to transistor computers such as the 1401, 1410, and 7070. Of course, they still had rooms full of punch card operators banging away on model 24's, 26's and the equivalent verifiers. And still needed duplicating punches, interpreters, and sorters.

I saw a 604, a couple 650's, and a 709--but never had to train to work on them.

And changing the oil on a 407 accounting machine was about like overhauling a beetle engine. At least as messy, anyway.

Gracious, some of us old f4rts go back a ways, don't we? ≤}B^)