On Thu, August 28, 2008 13:14, Bill Campbell wrote:
I started in 1966 on a Bendix G-20, graduating to the Burroughs B-5500 thence to the Burroughs Medium Systems, B-2500->B-4800.
Burroughs MCP (Master Control Program) ran circles around IBM's OS-3xx, and didn't require an army of support people to debug JCL and keep the thing running (sorta like the industry that exists to clean up after the Microsoft Virus, Windows, today).
I have the impression (never worked with it myself) that the B5500 was a classic, and Burroughs generally had some very good stuff going on.
We had an IBM 1130 for about a year, with a 1MB disk pack, about the size of a pizza box, and 8K words of magnetic core memory.
I played with an 1130 across the river at St. Olaf College, as well as two 1620s (our highschool actually had a 1620 in 1968, and they hadn't just gotten it then).
I don't think I still remember much about how to make drum cards, though. I *do* have some cards from back then out near my computer at home; found them cleaning out some stuff, and could quite bear to just dump them, so they're kicking around.
Making the multi-program drum cards was a bit nasty with multi-punching so I wrote an assembly program for the IBM 1130 that would read two program-1 cards, shift the second's codes appropriately, then punch multi-program cards.
Couldn't do that on the 1620 or the 1401, so I had to deal with them by hand.
I had another assembly program that would detect blank cards, selecting them to the alternate hopper making it easy to recover the blanks that people left lying around the key punches (there was a period during the 1970s when punch cards got very expensive and in rather short supply).
I wrote a program for the 1401 (to control the 1402) that would take cards from reader and punch and merge them in a defined sequence into the middle output hopper, which was selectable from both sides. The purpose being to create complexly striped decks from colored cards.
Luckily cards never got scarce while I was still using them. We were pretty thorougly off cards by 1976, though.
I moved to DEC hardware -- PDP-11 (running RSTS), and then when I graduated from college I moved to a DECSYSTEM-20 site, and then into DEC's field software support organization, and then into their engineering organization in Marlboro MA.