What I find a little sad is that the accounting machine world has been almost entirely ignored.
The punched card batch processing systems such as IBM's 402/403/407 machines and peripherals are documented and even still in existence here and there, but the manual entry machines that could once be found in every bank branch or small office and were the foundations of computer companies like Burroughs, NCR etc. have largely disappeared and are pretty sparsely documented. It's quite interesting to follow their evolution from motor-driven purely mechanical monsters full of cams, levers and springs corresponding to and actually called accumulators, registers etc. to completely solid state electronic systems with disk and tape drives, displays and terminals, line printers, communication capability, PPT and punched card devices etc. etc. Along the way there were many interesting innovations like small 96 column punched cards, magnetic striped ledger cards and automatic feeder/stackers, multiple cassette drives equivalent to the open reel versions, custom devices like the 'core counter' (a non-volatile electro-magnetic device that emitted a pulse for every 10 input pulses) etc.; a shame that so little documentation and examples remain today. m On Sun, May 19, 2024 at 11:28 AM Tarek Hoteit via cctalk < cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > A friend of a friend had a birthday gathering. Everyone there was in their > thirties, except for myself, my wife, and our friend. Anyway, I met a > Google engineer, a Microsoft data scientist, an Amazon AWS recruiter (I > think she was a recruiter), and a few others in tech who are friends with > the party host. I had several conversations about computer origins, the > early days of computing, its importance in what we have today, and so on. > What I found disappointing and saddening at the same time is their utmost > ignorance about computing history or even early computers. Except for their > recall of the 3.5 floppy or early 2000’s Windows, there was absolutely > nothing else that they were familiar with. That made me wonder if this is a > sign that our living version of classical personal computing, in which many > of us here in this group witnessed the invention of personal computing in > the 70s, will stop with our generation. I assume that the most engaging > folks in this newsgroup are in their fifties and beyond. (No offense to > anyone. I am turning fifty myself) I sense that no other generation > following this user group's generation will ever talk about Altairs, CP/M > s, PDPs, S100 buses, Pascal, or anything deemed exciting in computing. Is > there hope, or is this the end of the line for the most exciting era of > personal computers? Thoughts? > > Regards, > Tarek Hoteit > > >
