Sputnik, spaghetti and the IBM SPACE machine

Ah..Ha! He worked for ICL!!

I had some experience of 1401 computers but from afar. I agree about the print out. Like the tractr1 printers on the System /3 they were responsible for many multipart documents, clean and easy to read.

I had a brief stint on ICL in the 80's - How does a firm who came up with the DDE and bought Singer computers not be able to produce a data entry system which submitted jobs?? Or a decent printer?

I remember all the bootlace like wires for the 1401 and the stories of folks who wrote sort routines...

Those were the days when every cycle of your processor was yours and didn't flash up advertisements or reminders to get Genuine Annoyances.

In fact every instruction had a cycle count - Woe betide the programmer who did not program efficienctly as well as effectively.

Over here

And ICT's first TTL logic integrated circuit designs (190xA series) used ICs made by...Texas Instruments!

Nible and the likes...

I only had brief encounters with the 1401 in the "House for the History of IBM Data Processing", and it is something I can only recomend to anyone who is in the area (and is a bit of a nerd).

The two gentelmen who will guide you around are friendly and give some people the opportunety to "use" the machines.

It is absolutely fascinating how it all began and how Herman Hollerith started his enterprise.

Beware though... as far as I can remember, you have to let them know that you are comming, because they are not just open to the public as a normal museum. These people are volunteers and do this "work" and restauration in their owm time.

Happy days

Great article, Must go to the Museum soon to see a 1401 working again, maybe I'll get a chance to fix it if it breaks. I was a IBM customer engineer in the 60's and we looked after 1401's and other stuff (1440,60 and1620's as well as accounting machines) in the 60's in central London, then on to System/360. What a wonderful time it was. PS yes I remember ICL wavy line printers . You've made my day..

What?

"With his SPACE machine, Underwood remembers, you could calculate the powers of 2 with a mere nine instructions. "Today, you'd need tens of thousands," he says. "That's terrible.""

What- has someone removed Left Shift instruction from modern processors?

Dream job

"We were supposed to figure out what was coming ten years out," Underwood says. "But what we really did was screw around - and pretend we knew what we were talking about."

Where do I apply?

@AC 10:28

As is usual for people who work outside of the embedded world you have forgotten that, although your code to calculate the powers of 2 is brief, you will need many thousands of instructions in addition to produce an executable that will work with any current OS.

nine instructions?

Methinks he means 9 instructions to calculate powers of 2, and 100,000 to bring up the GUI, read the registry and present the data in the font and local numerical convention of your choice ;-( Or read the text file into WordPad and have it present the characters.... ;-( or... or...

Point is there is no commonly used IO device that lets you present ASCII to a human in under 100,000 instructions.

nine instructions?

re hugo @ 11:38

I remember that, as part of the IBM 1401/1410/7010 CE course, one was required to write, in machine code, a program that:

read a very simply encrypted punched card

decrypted it

printed the result on the line printer.

Then manually key that prog into storage and execute it.

Took considerably fewer than 100,000 instructions

(the simple encryption was just offsetting the alphanumerics by 1 - B on the card meant A, C meant B, and so on)

Best quote...

"The 1401 made a huge contribution to the 360. It paid for it."

I'm impressed. The 360's gestation was so legendarily expensive that the *book* about it was sufficiently historic to be republished in a 25th anniversary edition.

Oh Punch Cards, you bring back memories...

Nerd that I am, as an undergraduate at university I used to write love notes to my (then) girlfirend on 80 column punch cards from the IBM 360 housed in the center of the nerd universe <the Computer Sciences building, of course>.

Legacy software.

Although i never used it, Autocoder was the first language i ever learned. I didn't start writing "paid for" code till the end of the 60's when i worked for a company that sold time on a Dartmouth Basic system.

In the early 80's i was on a plane to COMDEX and sat next to a guy reading fanfold. I asked him what language he wrote and he told me he was maintaining the back office system for a large insurance company. It ran on an IBM 370, which emulated a 360 emulating a 1401 running Autocoder!

For all i know, there may still be autocoder in a production environment somewhere.

My mother used 1401s

I still have all her machine usage manuals and Autocoder manuals. It's still better than using jdeveloper.

Those were the days

The high school I attended in Detroit was blessed by donations of a 1401 for the "business" curricula and a 1620 for the scientific ones. I was in the first class to learn on the 1620 (in 1965-66) and we first learned in SPS (Symbolic Programming System), a language very much like Assembler. Then on to FORTRAN II.

Weird but wonderful in there was no fixed "word" size, just a string of digits delimited by special characters giving variable precision arithmetic at the cost of CPU cycles. Also didn't have a hardware adder allowing arithmetic in anything from base0 to base36. Was thus called the CADET: Can't Add, Doesen't Even Try.

We punched our own cards for program and data input and used either the console typewriter (literally an IBM electric typewriter controled by the CPU) or the high-speed card punch followed by the interpreting printer for output.

Now that was Real Programming! :-)

@hugo

"Point is there is no commonly used IO device that lets you present ASCII to a human in under 100,000 instructions."

Ascii ? I doubt it - Ebcdic more likely. I will check my chronology, although IBM invented them both, I think Ebcdic came first. And the instruction set had several packed to zone conversions, at least in 360.

Oh God, not the old 'back in the good old days' crap

Arr, when Oi were a lad, you'm didn't need none of yer fancy graphical user interfaces to calculate the powers of two. Aye, yer could do it in nine instructions. Now it's millions! Bloomin' madness, Oi tells yer.

Well that's us whippersnappers told then. Sure the machine might have weighed as much as a bus and cost half a million bucks, but you you could...drum roll...do the sort of wanky thing you learn how to do in first year Microprocessors Lab with a Z80 and a breadboard. Of course code was more efficient. The hardware was shite. To say you need hundreds of thousands of instructions to calculate the powers of two is ignoring the fact that those hundreds of thousands of instructions can also be used to display the results from computations that aren't so ball-achingly pointless.

Dont forget the other fun thing

Loading the object deck that made those joke print outs of out of "X"'s and "O"'s that would come crackling out of those printers a line at a time, to reveal.. an image of a naked woman on a bar stool in all the greenbar glory! Those were the days!