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. -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info