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>>I remember when a 2314 was the best thing that had ever happened to me.

HOLY CRAP — 2314 DASF??

I was moanin’ about 3350 DDs. Dang, think you could put together an Autocoder “Hello World” program?

I helped an SE debug a paper tape loader using CCW’s one time and I wrote my own memory swapping routines on an S-100, but you were there for the birth of Random Access.

I bow in your general direction and hand my Hollerith Pinball Crown to you.. :)

3350s were the thing! The day the first 3350 rolled in I think I actually drooled, those 2314 were junk and they'd crash right at the end of a big update (I worked in bank DP at the time), etc.

Never got to work with paper tape much other than being around them in a DEC shop for a short period but you'll enjoy this; we were early with ATM machines (offline of course) and they'd create a paper tape of each transaction. We'd collect the tapes, run them through a TI mini-something and that'd print out coupons with MICR encoding. Talk about the bad old days.

You can keep the crown, these days I'm lucky if I can code my name....

Hollerith Pinball Crown

Hey,...I want a shot at that....I remember this:

IBM 1405 Disk Storage

Announced October 10, 1960 and withdrawn June 30, 1970

The IBM 1405 Disk Storage of 1960 used improved technology to double the tracks per inch and bits per inch of track -- to achieve a fourfold increase in capacity -- compared to the IBM RAMAC disk file of 1956.

Storage units were available in 25-disk and 50-disk models, for a storage capacity of 10 million and 20 million characters, respectively. Recording density was 220 bits per inch (40 tracks per inch) and the head-to-disk spacing was 650 microinches. The disks rotated at 1800 rpm. Data were read or written at a rate of 17.5K bytes a second.

The 1405 was used in conjunction with the IBM 1410 Data Processing System. Each 1410 was capable of controlling up to five of the 1405s, for a total of 100 million characters. In addition, a single 1405 of either model could be attached to an IBM 1401 Data Processing System. The 1405 was reported to have been used with the "Walnut" information retrieval system of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in the 1960s. According to published reports, Walnut was the first mechanized system that could store and search millions of pages of documents.