Taking the bull by its horns [was background]

[Kyle Schmitt]

Ehh, why not?
30, male
First computer: Comodore 64
Preferred OS, any Unix or the like, usually a linux of my own crafting
or heavy modification.
Preferred languages: Ruby, C
Used at work: VBScript, VB.Net, JavaScript, PHP, Perl, bourne shell script.
Studied but not used for work: C++, Java, Lisp, (Apple|Comodore|Q)Basic
Education: BS In mathematics, minor in CS
Work: currently test-developer. Other times sysadmin, web
development, general development.
Current Location, Chicago suburbs


--Kyle

 

[John W. Kennedy]

I wouldn't characterize any 70X/70X0 machine as a follow-on to the 650.
They were a mainframe series derived from the Whirlwind project, an IBM
military contract. The R&D tab for the 70Xs was picked-up by the US
taxpayer. The 70Xs were vacuum tube machines and were introduced at the
same time as the 650 -- the 70X0s were the later transistorized
versions.

A) There were a number of completely different 70x/70x0 lines, and, B)
the Whirlwind was done by MIT; I cannot at this moment find any evidence
that IBM was involved at all, although IBM later used parts of the
abandoned Whirlwind II specs for the noncommercial AN/FSQ-7. Development
of the 701 was certainly stimulated by the Korean War, but it and its
successors were never intended specifically for government use.

I don't remember a 707, but if there was a 7070, I would
expect a 707 existed as a predecessor. I did some Fortran programming on
a 709 and a 7040.

That's simply wrong. There was no 707, and the 7070 /was/ the follow-on
to the 650, as any history of IBM's pre-360 computers will tell you. As
with the 701->704, 702->705, and 1401->1410 transitions, the machines
were not compatible, but general concepts and formats were. In this
case, the 7070 retained the basic 650 word architecture of ten decimal
digits plus a sign, and continued to use two-digit op-codes and
four-digit addresses. But the four digits that the 650 used for the
next-instruction address were replaced by two digits to select an index
register and two digits to select a subfield of the data word.

AFAIK, the 650 was developed as a business machine with IBM's own funds
by an entirely different engineering group than the Whirlwind group.
There is nothing in common between the two architectures. The 650 not
only used dual-address instructions, it wasn't even a binary machine. It
was a dead-end architecture.

No, the 7070, 7072, and 7074 were follow-ons to it.

The IBM pre-360 commercial lines (-> incompatible; => compatible):

The main scientific line
701->704=>709=>7090=>7094=>7094 II
|
.->7040=>7044
(The 7040 line was a cheaper subset of the 7090 line. It did /not/
derive directly from the 704, as some have incorrectly concluded from
the number.)

The famous STRETCH supercomputer. Not truly a failure, but IBM lost
money on it when they gave refunds because it wasn't as good as
promised. Still, a lot of STRETCH concepts, reworked, went into the 360.
7030

Budget scientific and real-time.
1620=>1710
(The 1710 was a 1620 with command-and-control extras. There was also a
one-off 1720.)

The main business line.
702->705=>705 II=>705 III=>7080

Cheaper business machines (and upward extensions).
1401=>1460
| |
| .->1440
|
.->1410=>7010
(The 1440 was an almost-compatible cheaper version of the 1401; the only
incompatibility was in the handling of punched cards and printing. The
1410 was an incompatible upward extension of the line; machine code was
different, but carefully written assembler code could be portable. Two
more systems in the line were the 1240 and the 1420, which were
essentially 1401s with magnetic-ink reader/sorters in the same chassis.)

The first machine with a disk for business. Existing systems with added
disks were more successful.
350

Budget general-purpose machines.
650->7070=>7072=>7074

Almost a PC. Too little and too late to get much of a market.
610

 

[Morton Goldberg]

No, the 7070, 7072, and 7074 were follow-ons to it.

The IBM pre-360 commercial lines (-> incompatible; => compatible):

The main scientific line
701->704=>709=>7090=>7094=>7094 II
|
.->7040=>7044
(The 7040 line was a cheaper subset of the 7090 line. It did /not/
derive directly from the 704, as some have incorrectly concluded
from the number.)

The famous STRETCH supercomputer. Not truly a failure, but IBM lost
money on it when they gave refunds because it wasn't as good as
promised. Still, a lot of STRETCH concepts, reworked, went into the
360.
7030

Budget scientific and real-time.
1620=>1710
(The 1710 was a 1620 with command-and-control extras. There was
also a one-off 1720.)

The main business line.
702->705=>705 II=>705 III=>7080

Cheaper business machines (and upward extensions).
1401=>1460
| |
| .->1440
|
.->1410=>7010
(The 1440 was an almost-compatible cheaper version of the 1401; the
only incompatibility was in the handling of punched cards and
printing. The 1410 was an incompatible upward extension of the
line; machine code was different, but carefully written assembler
code could be portable. Two more systems in the line were the 1240
and the 1420, which were essentially 1401s with magnetic-ink reader/
sorters in the same chassis.)

The first machine with a disk for business. Existing systems with
added disks were more successful.
350

Budget general-purpose machines.
650->7070=>7072=>7074

Almost a PC. Too little and too late to get much of a market.
610

That's pretty complete. I've never read a history of IBM -- I was
going entirely from my memory of working with early IBM computers and
the oral tradition transmitted me by the many IBM employees I have
known over the years. BTW, you omitted the 1130, which I remember as
small scientific/engineering machine roughly contemporary with the
1620. But we seem to have determined my memory isn't to be trusted.
So where do you place the 1130?

Regards, Morton

 

[Rick DeNatale]

That's pretty complete. I've never read a history of IBM -- I was
going entirely from my memory of working with early IBM computers and
the oral tradition transmitted me by the many IBM employees I have
known over the years. BTW, you omitted the 1130, which I remember as
small scientific/engineering machine roughly contemporary with the
1620. But we seem to have determined my memory isn't to be trusted.
So where do you place the 1130?

Well I'm working somewhat from memory, but the 1130 was later (1965)
than the 1620 (1959), the 1130 was introduced after the first 360s,
and used similar electronics packaging called SLT for solid logic
technology which was somewhere between discrete transistors (as the
1620 used) and ICs.

The architectures were completely different, the 1130 was a 16-bit
binary word machine while the 1630 was decimal using 6-bit BCD codes.
Numbers were represented by varying length strings of these BCD codes
addressed by the low order digit, and one of the extra bits (called
the flag bit) used to mark the high order digit, and if set on the low
order digit that the number was negative.

I know a little bit about the 1620 since it was the first computer I
encountered.

The main design goal of the 1620 was to be low priced (for the day)
that's something it did have in common with the 1130.

The first model of the 1620 had no hardware for addition, instead it
used a lookup table to add numbers right to left digit by digit. The
IBM internal code name was Cadet, which is purported to have really
meant Can't Add, Doesn't Even Try.

When I interviewed with IBM right out of college, one of the guys I
talked to was named Jack Gibson, who's most known for the Gibson Mix
which was a benchmark used to compare processor speeds. Jack was
quite tickled when I told him that I'd cut my teeth on the 1620. He'd
been on the project management team on the 1620 having come from a
similar job on Stretch. He said that when an engineer on Stretch
wanted approval to add a gate to the machine (gate here means a large
swinging rack holding circuit cards), and estimated a cost of say 10s
of thousands of dollars, the request was granted without much thought.
But on the 1620, if an engineer came in and said he needed to add
some pull-up resistors to a few circuits, and that it would cost, say
10s of dollars, he was told to go back to the drawing board.

 

[Eleanor McHugh]

Age: 37
First computer: RM 380Z (school), Oric-1 (home)
Preferred OS: OS X, FreeBSD, Windows XP - anything but Linux!
Languages: BASIC, FORTH, FORTRAN, C, Modula-2, ICON, Lisp, POP-11,
APL, Pascal, C++, Java, VB, Small, Ruby, UNICON, others I've
forgotten...
Preferred Languages: Ruby, BASIC, ICON
Education: BSc Applied Physics, MSc Information Systems
Work: as little as possible ;p
Location: London


Ellie

Being and Doing are merely useful abstractions for the 'time'-
dependent asymmetries of phase space.

 

[John W. Kennedy]

That's pretty complete. I've never read a history of IBM -- I was going
entirely from my memory of working with early IBM computers and the oral
tradition transmitted me by the many IBM employees I have known over the
years. BTW, you omitted the 1130, which I remember as small
scientific/engineering machine roughly contemporary with the 1620. But
we seem to have determined my memory isn't to be trusted. So where do
you place the 1130?

From a marketing viewpoint, but not architecturally, it was the
follow-on to the 1620, and the 1800, which had mostly the same
instruction set as the 1130, was the follow-on to the 1710. (There was
also a 1500, which was designed for CAI applications.) But the 1130 was
post-360 -- IBM's first admission that the 360 couldn't handle every
niche -- so I didn't include it.

The 1620 and 1130 were both noted for their omissions. The original 1620
required an addition table and a multiplication table to be loaded by
the operating system, or the arithmetic opcodes wouldn't work. This is
why the 1620's code name, "Cadet", was elucidated by wags as "Can't Add,
Doesn't Even Try". The later, advanced models didn't need the addition
table, but still needed the other.

The 1130, on the other hand, was famous for its I/O facilities, which
were comparable to systems of the early 1950s. For example, the console
typewriter required the operating system to:
read each stroke from the keyboard as a 12-bit code,
translate the 12-bit code from a punched-card column to EBCDIC
(the keyboard came straight off the 029 keypunch),
translate the EBCDIC code to a code called Tilt-Rotate code, and
send the Tilt-Rotate code to the "golf ball", to print the character.

 

[Bertram Scharpf]

Hi,

Am Samstag, 21. Jul 2007, 09:38:18 +0900 schrieb Eleanor McHugh:

Preferred OS: OS X, FreeBSD, Windows XP - anything but Linux!

BSD preferred is ok; but XP preferred to Linux??? Please
explain.

Btw:

m41y
bg (chonologically): Basic, 6502 Assembler, Pascal, C, PostScript,
C++, ...[lots], TeX, METAFONT, Ruby
wk:Ruby,C++,Postgres,bash
gt:Strat,SG

Bertram

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

A) There were a number of completely different 70x/70x0 lines, and, B)
the Whirlwind was done by MIT; I cannot at this moment find any evidence
that IBM was involved at all, although IBM later used parts of the
abandoned Whirlwind II specs for the noncommercial AN/FSQ-7. Development
of the 701 was certainly stimulated by the Korean War, but it and its
successors were never intended specifically for government use.

Considering the price and strategic nature of the technology, you pretty
much had to be a government agency or contractor thereof to get one in
their heyday. But yes, it was not government-specific. I imagine if some
rich movie star or musician had wanted one, they could have plunked down
the x.x million and IBM would have built them one. But they did suck at
synthesizing music.

That's simply wrong. There was no 707, and the 7070 /was/ the follow-on
to the 650, as any history of IBM's pre-360 computers will tell you. As
with the 701->704, 702->705, and 1401->1410 transitions, the machines
were not compatible, but general concepts and formats were. In this
case, the 7070 retained the basic 650 word architecture of ten decimal
digits plus a sign, and continued to use two-digit op-codes and
four-digit addresses. But the four digits that the 650 used for the
next-instruction address were replaced by two digits to select an index
register and two digits to select a subfield of the data word.

As an aside, I worked at IBM during the transition from the 7000 series
to System\360. There was never a 707, and wouldn't have been because of
the airliner. The 704 was originally called the 703 but someone else
grabbed that number and so IBM moved to 704, forcing the follow-on to
the 702 into 705.

More notes from that period: in addition to FORTRAN, IBM developed a
language called COMTRAN for business programming. It never caught on,
though, mostly because Grace Murray Hopper and Univac and the Feds put
all their weight behind COBOL.

No, the 7070, 7072, and 7074 were follow-ons to it.

The 7070 was kind of a half-breed business and scientific machine. Yes,
its architecture looked like a 650, but it had a real FORTRAN compiler,
tape drives and all the other mainframe peripherals.

The IBM pre-360 commercial lines (-> incompatible; => compatible):

The main scientific line
701->704=>709=>7090=>7094=>7094 II
|
.->7040=>7044
(The 7040 line was a cheaper subset of the 7090 line. It did /not/
derive directly from the 704, as some have incorrectly concluded from
the number.)

The 709 was a short-lived beast. The architecture of the 709 and 7090
were almost identical, and IIRC there were less than a dozen 709s built.
The 709 was a tube machine and the 7090 was a transistor machine, so
most folks just kept their 704s going until they could get a 7090.

By the way, IIRC the 701 did not have hardware floating point or index
registers. It was essentially a 36-bit version of the Von Neumann IAS
machines like ILLIAC I, ORDVAC, JOHNNIAC, etc. Both floating point
arithmetic and index registers appeared in the 704. The 709/7090 added
I/O channels and indirect addressing, but not much else.

Budget scientific and real-time.
1620=>1710
(The 1710 was a 1620 with command-and-control extras. There was also a
one-off 1720.)

This niche later was occupied by the 1130 and 1800, respectively.

The main business line.
702->705=>705 II=>705 III=>7080

Cheaper business machines (and upward extensions).
1401=>1460
| |
| .->1440
|
.->1410=>7010
(The 1440 was an almost-compatible cheaper version of the 1401; the only
incompatibility was in the handling of punched cards and printing. The
1410 was an incompatible upward extension of the line; machine code was
different, but carefully written assembler code could be portable. Two
more systems in the line were the 1240 and the 1420, which were
essentially 1401s with magnetic-ink reader/sorters in the same chassis.)

The 7010 was pretty much upward compatible from the 1410.

Budget general-purpose machines.
650->7070=>7072=>7074

I wouldn't call any 7000-series mainframe a "budget" system. The
hardware, power, cooling, weight and size were quite similar. They all
had "SMS" card logic and magnetic core memories, although some of the
core memories were air cooled and some were oil cooled. The closest
thing to a "budget mainframe" before System\360 was probably the 7010.

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

From a marketing viewpoint, but not architecturally, it was the
follow-on to the 1620, and the 1800, which had mostly the same
instruction set as the 1130, was the follow-on to the 1710. (There was
also a 1500, which was designed for CAI applications.) But the 1130 was
post-360 -- IBM's first admission that the 360 couldn't handle every
niche -- so I didn't include it.

The 1620 and 1130 were both noted for their omissions. The original 1620
required an addition table and a multiplication table to be loaded by
the operating system, or the arithmetic opcodes wouldn't work. This is
why the 1620's code name, "Cadet", was elucidated by wags as "Can't Add,
Doesn't Even Try". The later, advanced models didn't need the addition
table, but still needed the other.

The 1130, on the other hand, was famous for its I/O facilities, which
were comparable to systems of the early 1950s. For example, the console
typewriter required the operating system to:
read each stroke from the keyboard as a 12-bit code,
translate the 12-bit code from a punched-card column to EBCDIC
(the keyboard came straight off the 029 keypunch),
translate the EBCDIC code to a code called Tilt-Rotate code, and
send the Tilt-Rotate code to the "golf ball", to print the character.

Ah, the 1130 -- the computer IBM named after lunch time.

Of course you know that the 1620 didn't have an adder. *Everybody* knows
that. Well ... the 1130 didn't have an adder *either*. It did adds using
shifts, ANDs and XORs. Seriously. IIRC the 1800 *did* have an adder.

 

[Morton Goldberg]

The 1620 and 1130 were both noted for their omissions. The original
1620 required an addition table and a multiplication table to be
loaded by the operating system, or the arithmetic opcodes wouldn't
work. This is why the 1620's code name, "Cadet", was elucidated by
wags as "Can't Add, Doesn't Even Try". The later, advanced models
didn't need the addition table, but still needed the other.

I remember the 1620. I wrote programs for it for about three years
beginning in 1962. The one I used must have been one of the
"advanced" models -- I remember putting multiplication table cards at
the front of my program decks, but not addition table cards. The
other thing I remember about about the 1620, besides its variable
word length, was its propensity for throwing its console typewriter's
zero key across the room. The console typewriter was a pre-golf-ball
model with lever keys. The zero key, by far the most used key, was
continually fatiguing off and going airborne.

Oh, yes, I just remembered. The 1620 brought two firsts to my
programming experience: a drum plotter and a disk storage unit. I
really enjoyed writing programs that did output to the plotter.

Regards, Morton

 

[Morton Goldberg]

... was its propensity for throwing its console typewriter's zero
key across the room. The console typewriter was a pre-golf-ball
model with lever keys. The zero key, by far the most used key, was
continually fatiguing off and going airborne.

Let me say -- before somebody else points it out -- that I know the
console typewriter wasn't designed to do the job of a line printer. I
heard that song from the IBM maintenance guy every time he had to
install a new zero key. The company I worked for was too cheap to by
a line printer. We eventually got a drum plotter for the 1620, but we
never got a real printer for it.

Regards, Morton

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Let me say -- before somebody else points it out -- that I know the
console typewriter wasn't designed to do the job of a line printer. I
heard that song from the IBM maintenance guy every time he had to
install a new zero key. The company I worked for was too cheap to by a
line printer. We eventually got a drum plotter for the 1620, but we
never got a real printer for it.

Regards, Morton

When I worked in a 1620 shop, we had a 407 to generate the reports from
punched cards out of the 1620.

 

[Cliff Rowley]

m30y (31 on Thursday!)
Background: basic (bbc/acorn/spectrum), visual basic, pascal, c, c++,
omnis, php, (x)html/css/etc, xml/xsl/xsd/etc, sql, javascript, bash,
perl, java, tcl, python, ruby (!).. touched on a few others such as C#
but not my thing..
Work: freelance software engineer / web developer / anything I feel like
getting into really..
Location: London, UK

 

[Dan Zwell]

Why the heck not...

Dan here, 22, Male.
Started with a bit of javascript, then bash, then awk,
then I changed my major to computer science =).

Learnt a lot of Java, some C++, but Ruby was the first language I felt
extremely comfortable with. Ruby taught me what it really meant to be
comfortable with a language. I had been trying to learn Haskell (a very
good thing to study, but less than practical to use, for most people),
but I fell in love with Ruby while the Haskell books were in the mail...

I'm writing C++ nowadays (for the summer, at least), and it seems that
C++ with the Boost libraries and the STL certainly isn't as beautiful as
Ruby, but it gets the job done with its own equivalents for ary.each { }
and ary.map { }, delete_if, Proc.new, etc. Sometimes I even find strict
typing to save me effort in catching mistakes.

Work: student / intern, for now.

Dan

 

[Robert Dober]

Age: 37
First computer: RM 380Z (school), Oric-1 (home)
Preferred OS: OS X, FreeBSD, Windows XP - anything but Linux!
Languages: BASIC, FORTH, FORTRAN, C, Modula-2, ICON, Lisp, POP-11,
APL, Pascal, C++, Java, VB, Small, Ruby, UNICON, others I've
forgotten...
Preferred Languages: Ruby, BASIC, ICON
Education: BSc Applied Physics, MSc Information Systems
Work: as little as possible ;p
Location: London

So we have a lady and nobody seems to notice

Thanks for posting.

 

[Robert Klemme]

Am Samstag, 21. Jul 2007, 09:38:18 +0900 schrieb Eleanor McHugh:

BSD preferred is ok;

Why? Please explain!

but XP preferred to Linux??? Please
explain.

Cheers

robert

 

[Robert Klemme]

So we have a lady and nobody seems to notice

<warning>Generalizing from yourself might lead to wrong
conclusions.</warning>



Cheers

robert



PS: I am not sure what exactly you expected. Should we all embark on
courting Ellie? That certainly would be funny... Ok boys, GO! ))
*chuckle*

 

[Sylvain Joyeux]

male 26y
bg: C++ (lots of, and I do like it), perl, java, OCaml. Ruby is now my
language of choice, with C++ lying around for the performance-related
parts.
wk: phd student in robotics
location: Toulouse/France

Sylvain

 

[Robert Dober]

<warning>Generalizing from yourself might lead to wrong
conclusions.</warning>

Do you think I am of the gender gender? (Which would be?)
No seriously did somebody notice?

 

[Alex Young]

Do you think I am of the gender gender? (Which would be?)
No seriously did somebody notice?

I think most of us realised a while ago, and didn't think it worth
mentioning