🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1990Oct...@osf.org> dbr...@osf.org (David Brooks)
writes:

>Come on, anyone programmed with plug-in cables?

     I did!  The first machine I ever got my hands on was a Univac
1004, at the end of 1965.  After studying some manuals I found at
my uncle's place, he took me in to his office one day (I was 15 at
the time) and I got to play around with it.  I could close my (by
then crossed) eyes and see the brightly coloured wires dancing.
This beast was an all-in-one unit consisting of a 400-card-per-minute
reader (hey, does anybody remember 90-column cards?), a 400-lpm
drum printer which could probably survive a nuclear attack, and a
whopping 961 (31*31) 6-bit bytes of core.  An 200-cpm card punch
(built like a tank) stood nearby.  The plugboard had, I seem to
recall, 5120 hubs which you could wire together to your heart's
content, although many of them were "collectors" (diode-ORs) and
"distributors" (diode-protected fan-outs).

     Univac later upgraded the 1004 to a 1005 by providing a super
plugboard with lots of transistors that you put in and left there;
it made the machine act like a genuine *stored-program computer*
complete with a weird little card-based assembler.  They made it
possible to access the 32nd row and column of that little core box
(in a manner suitable only for storing one-byte values, but what
the heck, it was now a real K) and added some more so you could
have two or even 4K.

     The contacts I made in those early days came in handy when the
time came to look for a real job, and I've been working on Univac->
Sperry->Unisys equipment ever since (although I flee to my Amiga to
get the bad taste out of my mouth :-).

Charlie_Gibbs@mindlink.UUCP
I'm trying to develop a photographic memory.