🚀 go-pugleaf

On Saturday, March 17, 2018 at 8:48:56 PM UTC-4, rne...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Saturday, March 17, 2018 at 8:15:27 PM UTC-4, Dan Espen wrote:
> > If I ever read that the bits in my brain must have flipped.
> > I only encountered a 1400 character 1401 after I'd worked on them
> > for a few years.  I was surprised they made them that small.
> 
> Remember, "electronically programmable tabulator". I distinctly remember reading a sales brochure pushing that view. The idea was that (in computer terms) the thing would be programmed in machine language. Hence A for Add, S for Subtract, M for Move, and so on. Compared to the existing plug board programmable tabulators, 1400 characters of storage for data and program was huge.

Part of the IBM's goals was to meet European needs for a more
sophisticated tabulator, due to tougher banking demands in Europe.

The IBM history also notes the development of RPG for the 1401,
the book says it made it possible for former plugboard operators
to easily program the computer, more easily than in Autocoder or
SPS.  (RPG needed more memory).  As we know, RPG in fancier
versions became very popular on S/3 machines and their
descendants.  (I don't know about today and the "i" series.)





> > No disk on the 1460 I used, but the 1440 had disk.
> > The 1311 disk wasn't exactly huge.  1 meg per drive.
> 
> Agreed. But there was a big fixed disk random access unit (I do not remember the model number) which had a total capacity of several megabytes, more than you could get by hanging 1311's on a 1401. While a 1401 could run 1311's, a 1460 was required to operate this big beast.

Ironically, I think the book said the 1440 got disk before the
1401 did for marketing reasons.  I it said the 1440 turned out to
be a poor seller due to poor price/performance.

I believe the 14xx series eventually could support the big disk
drive (50 meg) developed for RAMAC.

I still wonder when the last 1401 emulator was turned off (or if
any are still running.  I'm guessing 1990s for Y2K, which is
what we did.