🚀 go-pugleaf

On Fri, 28 Nov 1997 22:51:40 -0500, The Bakers <mba...@monmouth.com>
wrote:

>Glad to see some postings about the H-200.  I also played with one in the
>very early 1970s.
>
>* Had 4 sense switches on the console.....lit push buttons, which you
>pushed once to set the sense switch on, and pushed again to turn it off.

OK, you made me do it.  I dug out my hand written notes on the system.
The only sense switch we ever used was 1, to bypass bad spots on
tapes.
>
>* The console was indeed built by Teletype.  Had a "printbox" sort of
>mechanism which printed on roll paper.  Could act as a full featured I/O
>device from your program (COBOL DISPLAY/ACCEPT, etc.) but also had a

Our display console was address 07, accept console was 47.

>handful of keys which were active when the machine was stopped & would be
>used to enter bootstrap commands, display & change memory (in octal),
>etc.  Still remember booting from tape as
>
>    B 40 000000    where B meant Bootstrap, 40 was device address for tape
>drive, and 000000 was octal address to load into.
>
>    B 41 000317    for loading object decks produced by COBOL from the
>card reader (device address 41) -- don't remember reason for offset
>loading address.

How about B 41 001620 for Easycoder Assembler?

>
>    B 44 000000    for booting up the disk-based OS (44 was the address of
>the disk drive(s))

We had no disk drives!!

>* There was a tape-based operating system, and a disk-based operating
>system too.
>
>* You always pressed STOP and INITIALIZE before booting.  Then the run
>button after the B command from the console had done its work.

COBOL compiles were 40 - B, 40 - B, Run - Run - Run!

>
>* The tape drives could be mapped (physical drive # to logical drive #
>with a set of thumbwheels on the front of the tape controller in the CPU
>frame).  Likewise for the disk drives, although we only had one so it
>didn't make a lot of sense to change its thumbwheels.

Yeah I remember those too.  Our instructor used to threaten us with
severe bodily harm if he ever saw us set the SYSTEM drive with PERMIT
status.

I see from one of my many printouts that the COBOL compiler was
version 12.0.  SOURCE-COMPUTER is "H-200 SPECIAL".

>* You could write nifty one card programs in machine language to do 80/80
>listings, 80/80 card dupes, make a copy of a source deck (cols. 1-72) and
>punch sequence # in 73-80, etc....just bootstrap the card in, and go.

Yeah we had all those too.

>
>Nifty machine for a 14 year old to explore, and in retrospect, probably
>very little damage I could have done as long as I didn't physically mount
>any tapes or disk packs which were used for "production".

I was 17 & 18 when I used it.  I've even got a gen-yew-wine Honeywell
flowcharting template (remember flowcharts?).

One problem we had was the character set differed somewhat from that
used by the IBM keypunch machines, so we had a chart taped to the wall
behind each keypunch machine with stuff like this:

                    IBM    =     Honeywell
                     @     =         :
                     %     =         (
                     <      =         )

etc.  That kept things interesting.

We even had an 024 keypunch, the kind that didn't even print readable
text above each column, so you had to be *really* good to read a card
from it!!  

According to my notes the H200 had 16k of memory.  I don't know if
this is bytes or words.

Dan