In my post about the accounting machine era I forgot to mention that of course they were all programmable; the mechanical versions used different length pins, sometimes custom made with a special tool, that went into a 'magazine' to define the various columns and the operations to be performed there; as electronics started to take over, patch panels full of jumper wires (just like IBM's EAM panels) appeared, and finally 'soft' programming appeared with assemblers, report generators and 'high' level languages cross-compiled on larger systems.
Programs were loaded by inserting a 'magazine' (usually about 30" long and weighing about 10 lbs.), inserting a patch panel, or the 'modern way' from punched cards*, paper tape, magnetic cards, mag tape or cassette, diskette or even remotely. *Another innovation was the 'Edge punched card', a card normally the size of an 80 column Hollerith card but with 8-column paper tape punched holes along the edge so it could be read with a PPT reader. A shame that there isn't a video anywhere of an operator entering data into a Burroughs L9000 and then processing it with 4 cassettes spinning back and forth like their big brothers, automatically feeding ledger cards through the console and the external high-speed reader, printing a log and reports on the dual console printer and the external high-speed printer, maybe sending summary data to a remote system etc., while the operator takes a coffee break. BTW, AFAIK the Burroughs B80 and B90 were the last machines of this class and the only ones with (8") diskette drives; does anyone know of any later ones? 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 > >
