:’) I thought it was going to work as a GGG topic. Dang.
“Sparkler Filters’ IBM 402”
Hard skill to find! I started at IBM computer operations in 1967. Those machines were still around; but being phased out. I wired those 402 boards along with 548, 514, and the 85 sorter. They started me on the 1401 then advanced me to the 7010 computer. Hot stuff for the time.
without the antikythera (sp) device, this study is incomplete
Up to 2003, I used a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-8A from the late 1960’s to perform and calculate results for spectrochemical analysis on metal samples.
The computer was programmed using “Octal” numbers. The program was loaded using punch tape.
That computer ran nearly continuously from 1979 until 2003. It had, as I remember, 16K of memory and had been upgraded to 32K. It filled a cabinet about 2 feet square and 4 feet high.
I worked at DEC for almost ten years. We were WAY ahead of our time both in hardware and especially software.
I just unearthed a circa 1983 AT&T PC from my basement. It has been through a major fire and a burst water pipe, and has been sitting down there, lonely and unloved, for 20 years. IT STILL WORKS. I have no earthly use for it but can’t bear to take it to the dump. It deserves to live! Maybe I’ll clean the data off it and sell it to a collector.
This antique here (Dell 2005 w/the Windows XP it came with) still works great.
I know of many critical national defense systems running on computer made in the 1960’s through the early 1980’s. Why? Because they work. The engineers of that time knew how to create systems the run. Today’s computer programmers just love to create cool looking things and managers don’t know a thing abuout computers and don’t know how to make such systems.
The 402 pictured was an “accounting machine,” taking a stack of punched cards, doing some simple totalizing math, and printing out journals and statements.
It was “programmed” by a panel with hundreds of jack holes into which you plugged up to a couple hundred patch wires to do the appropriate column arrangements and totalizer functions. The panels were on frames which were removable, so you could have a shelf of them ready for whichever run you needed to make.
The 402 was little sister to the 407, which I helped to maintain on a couple of occasions (in 1963, mind you).
It’s a wonder they can still maintain that stuff. An IBM field office held a very large stock of exotic bits and pieces for these monsters back in the day, but that’s all long gone by now.
Pinging you because I know how much you love that Apple IIe of yours.
If we followed the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” philosophy, we’d all be driving Model T’s and working in CICS and there would be little reason for innovation.
I prefer the “if it isn’t broke, improve it” philosophy.
OS/2 was way ahead of its time, and far superior to the version of Windows available at that time. The reason OS/2 is still in use, especially in financial institutions, is the fact that version 2 was specifically designed to act as a peer with AS400 systems.
What killed OS/2 commercially was that the hardware needed to run it really wasn't available at the time (it was a REAL 32 bit OS), and there simply weren't that many applications written for it: That was back in the day when IBM was really iron fisted when it came to licensing technology and IP.
Mark
Also, Amiga kudos. A machine WAY ahead of it's time. For better or worse, Alex St. John, one of the fellows who was behind the design of DirectX was influenced by the Amiga OS architecture.
