Rlplaut’s COAL series has been a superbly engaging read. Amongst the cars and partners, there’s been much about his career in computer programming. Until his stories, I have had little interest in this subject but a recent article in The Guardian has also opened my eyes to the beauty of early computing. Maybe I’m hijacking the CC code of subject matter with this piece, but at least this cover model – the Pilot ACE from a design by Alan Turing – has four wheels.
These images are the work of photographer James Ball who practices under the name Docubyte, and the series is called ‘Guide to Computing’. James located a number of archaic computers in various collections around the UK and photographed them. The photos were then retouched by his colleagues at INK to look like new, eliminating all signs of age and disrepair.
This one’s my favourite – the CDC 6600 designed by Seymour Cray in all its ‘2001: A Space Odyssey-like’ glory. There may be some wondering at the point of this exercise, but consider this. Some of these computers were built as industrial equipment, and would never have had a glossy brochure or been subject to high-quality photography when they were new, so James has allowed these fascinating units to be seen afresh.
Docubyte is selling copies of these images, just click on the link below for more info.
Beautiful and inspiring stuff.
Further Reading:
The 6600 picture is the console, not the actual computer. Wikipedia has a picture of the core hardware, which was usually surrounded by a battery of tape drives and hard drives. I ran software on one these that kept it busy for hours.
I got quite a bit of console time on a CDC Cyber in college, as well as on a Prime 550 at the engineering firm where I worked part time to help pay for college.
As time progressed, the main frames were accessible via room a full of remote terminals. In the early 70’s one input programs on cards via the card reader.
Georgia Tech still taught punch cards when I started in 1980. All gone by the time I graduated six years later. I wrote my senior project documentation on a Macintosh (original 128K with the luxury of a second, external “floppy”drive).
My first computer was a MacPlus with 1 meg and I had a second floppy drive too. I learned programming on an IBM 1130. There was an older IBM, possibly a 1620, which required a deck of cards to load the compiler before your program was read in. I did not use this machine though. The 1130 had a disk system for the operating system. I also had a course in analog computing and hands on an analog computer.
The 6600 had a drum drive for intermediate storage, which we used, as our model exceeded the core storage. The 7600 had disk drives plus a large core memory for intermediate storage. Using LCM required some additional software development, but the idea was to send big files to the disks rather than short ones.
Long after we got workstations at home that would run the program nearly as well as the older supercomputers. My home computer, an iMac with an I7 processor, could probably run the program if I had a compiler and could find some graphics software. The supercomputer could do microfilm graphics.
Lawrence Tech had a DEC Vax mainframe (Dr. Marburger was very proud of this), a room full of dumb terminals, half a dozen of dusty IBM key punch machines in the Science Bldg., and a small room, in the Architecture and Design Bldg. with Mac Classics and a laser printer.
For my FORTRAN classes I deliberately used the keypunch for fun, wanting to do it old school (wondering what became of all those keypunch operators who responded to the ads on WJBK for good paying jobs) knowing it was going to be gone after that semester; so I know the trials and thrills of compiling debugging repeating.
The room full of dumb terminals was filled with students using a well developed BBS written by Mr Sunshine (“Meow”). The terminals in the computer center were used to communicate via bitnet/ DARPA-net didn’t work very well as there were so few places connected.
Finally, for most non computer science majors, a few of us in the engineering program and were aware of the resource, the future was in the A&D labs with the Mac and it’s point and click mouse, Cricketgraph graphing software and word processor for making nice lab reports when most colleagues were typing and hand drawing their graphs. (The school newspaper being laid out on an Apple ][).
At the same time in my internship at Cummins, alongside developing the 6BT5.9 Ram engine, I was doing some simple things on an HP mainframe, programming in VisiCalc on a small HP desktop computer, using Leading Edge word processing in a new color IBM PC (all inherited from the defunct Bendix Research Labs) and communicating with the then extant Cummins research center in Groß Gerau West Germany) using the internal email system called TISS (Total Office Support System) all 30 of us using one of 3 central email terminals.
I’m way too late to have used punch cards, but I do remember when I toured Virginia Tech in high school, the tour guide mentioned that one of the buildings was designed to look like a punch card. Maybe an urban legend, not sure. I wonder what it would have read if true?
Yes, Cybers were the rage during my computing youth both at college & at my 1st employer. 60 bit words, 10 6-bit characters per word (no lowercase or ASCII yet). Mainframe makers never revealed the clock or memory speeds. And there were real, noisy line printers too, with 14″ fanfold paper instead of sissy laser-printers. There was general excitement when our 300 baud terminals were upgraded to 1200. Now a person could live…
Now we also had a PDP-11/70, and it was more fun since it had (after-hrs. only) games like Lunar Lander, Dungeon, & Adventure, though I think there was a Star Trek for the Cyber & Weather War for the Tektronix 4014-series terminal. So students didn’t need iPhones to be able to waste time!
I can still hear the noise of that printer, thirty years after leaving the lab.
A fair amount of computer work/skill building involved fooling around with like printers. I worked at small places where we did our own runs and tended the printer. We used to pray that n entire report would print before something jammed.
I wrote Fortran in the 1960s. We did a lot of crude programming to format reports. Seems like more effort went into formatting the output than in the actual engineering work.
By the time I got to university in the early 90’s, we had pc’s acting as remote terminals – we never dealt with teletype or punch cards. They never let students get close enough to the Sperry to cause any problems. They were in process of replacing that with IBM, but that didn’t complete till my junior year. Most of my programming corse work was performed on either PC’s or minicomputers (Sun, IBM, and one SGI.) I do remember one line printer that was the size of a washing machine.
These days, my company doesn’t even touch the heavy equipment. They got rid of their last IBM Z-series years ago.
Noone had a better computer or put it to better use than Batman.
And it was clearly labeled too, so visitors could recognize it.
I don’t buy the notion that early computers weren’t “glamorized”. DEC did a lot of flashy advertising of its PDP-8 and PDP-11 series in the ’60s. Google those and you’ll see plenty, including this oddly CCish picture:
http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/minicomputers/11/331
Love that pic of it in the VW. The equivalent of today’s laptop!
That row of switches looks like nothing so much as a row of stop tabs on an organ console.
Your description is more accurate than you might think…
My first hands-on experience with a computer was with an original PDP-8 like the one pictured (many more PDP-8 models would follow). The faculty of engineering PDP-8 was equipped with a grand total of 4096 12-bit words of RAM (implemented with magnetic cores), and two head-per-track hard disks with 64K 12-bit-words of storage.
The front panel switches had multiple functions, the most essential was ‘toggling in the bootstrap’. There was no boot ROM (or BIOS), so we had to manually enter a short program using the front panel switches in order to boot a very primitive operating system from the hard disk, each time the PDP-8 was turned on. The switches could also be used to step through any program, one instruction at a time. It was also possible to read back the switches from a program in order to modify its behaviour.
Our PDP-8 was connected to an analog computer, which could be programmed (via a patch panel) to perform very complex differential and integral calculus, using very little of the PDP-8’s limited computing power.
The analog computer had a number of DACs (digital to analog converters) and ADCs (analog to digital converters), so it was possible to connect this digital/analog hybrid computer to all kinds of external devices, including a crude vector display, sound generators, sensors of all types, etc.
So yes, we now have all the ingredients to turn this very expensive piece of hardware into a very crude organ using the front panel switches as a keyboard!
I was surprised when visiting Lick Observatory (N. CA) in the ’80s, for they still had a PDP-8 there. Unlike later models, it had a 12 bit word size, not 16 like the PDP-11.
PDP meant “Programmed Data Processor,” which according to legend, was a euphemism to get it around the mainframe bureaucracy worried about their turf.
Ah, our high school had a donated PDP-9, where I learned all the Fortran I soon forgot.
Had IBM as a client for many years. Their headquarters in Armonk has a corridor to the cafeteria that’s full of classics like this, and other IBM gems like the original Hollerith punch-card tabulators, the first floppy disk and Elliot Noyes’ sublime 1961 Selectric. And in front of the cafeteria, the scales and meat grinders they once made – they were International Business Machines long before they made their first computer.
My favorite relic was actually at their conference center across the Hudson – the control panel from the SAGE early warning radar system. Quite a piece of Cold War memorabilia. Here’s a pic of a similar control panel at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, which has a great collection of early computers:
Not only did DEC do flashy advertising, they did flashy internal advertising, and they got flashy people to pose for these inside ads. That handsome dark haired guy standing in the back just got married to his Irish princess.
The beautiful smiling lady (Cindy) and the pointing guy behind her (Howie) made up the DEC AP sales team. The bearded guy in front of the terminal (Ed) was the brains of the outfit. Literally. I was writing all of our work up and developing the AP user guide for our “product”. At DEC I was no longer “technical”, but technical sales support.
Ed and I were a technical sales support team for a long time. He was (and still is) way beyond smart.
The dumb terminal we’re all looking at in the ad isn’t connected to anything. But we were a hell of a team.
The other guys in the suits are corporate suits. That’s why they wear the suits. See? Sometimes titles makes sense.
This was after my solo World Trade Center North Tower project and ran in the middle of the team oriented Department of Correction sales effort.
Busy and exciting exciting times.
So that’s what you look like without a dachshund.
My company never really worked with DEC; we were started by a bunch of former IBM’ers that absolutely hated their ex-competition. DEC, Compaq, and HP – they were nearly as persona non-Grata as EDS.
My 1st employer had some publicity shots for test equipment, of all things, and even they were graced with pretty girls. Remarkable since they were actually engineers who worked there, not models!
Fair point occam24. I’ve amended the text from ‘all’ to ‘some’.
The H.A.L. 9000 was pretty cool too
I’m sorry, Dave. We cannot allow you to post this. 🙂
Love it, jpc! And my name is actually Dave!
Back when they used vacuum tubes, computers were really something. After that? Meh.
The first (?) personal computer had tubes! Not a desktop but a desk. By Librascope.
I’m trying to find an ad that I saw reprinted years ago of one of the ’60’s Librascope desks in a very sexy ad. I’ll post it if I can find it.
http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/early-computer-companies/5/116
https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/alt.folklore.computers/TB7YCtSpmGU
Right? What could be simpler to use and more elegant to look at, I ask you?
Everything’s right there in front of you.
Might not be within reach while you’re seated, though…
What is that over the keyboard? Some sort of display?
Some car dashboards are beginning to resemble that.
I would argue that the first personal computer was the Digi Comp 1, circa 1965:
http://www.dograt.com/2007/10/24/digi-comp-1-the-first-home-computer/
I found the article I was looking for. Vacuum Tube Valley, Issue 9, Spring 1998, p18. “Computing With Tubes: The Savage Art” by Eric Barbour.
https://web.archive.org/web/20131122141604/http://www.jumpjet.info/Pioneering-Wireless/eMagazines/VTV/VTV09.pdf
This image is taken from the article.
hehehe. that’s fantastic
A computer in the middle of a field. Makes about as much sense as the Chrysler ads with car seats in the middle of fields.
Less creepy though.
An early IBM vacuum tube computer:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/701.html
Tubes Rock!
Literally. They are still used in guitar amps for the sound quality. I had a girlfriend in high school, ’82-’83ish, her parents got a Sony Hi-Fi as a wedding present. Real wood cabinets (it was a modular system) and full of vacuum tubes, it was simply amazing. I would love to have it today, but not her 🙂
My Dad still has his old tube tester packed away somewhere (and a box of old tubes).
At my first job after college (circa 2003) I was chatting with the IT guy for the Industrial Engineering Department. Older guy who’d made the transition from an electronics tech to computer support. We were talking about music (Wade was a drummer himself) and mentioned that I needed to replace one of the tubes in my amp. He opened a cabinet in his office that had literally hundreds of boxed new-stock tubes, some of the date stamps going back to the 60’s, and invited me to take a couple if any were the right model. While no longer a matched set with the others, that 30+ year old tube fixed the buzzing problem I was having!
Tubes (UK: valves) were controversial at first, it took some persuasion to get away from relays in early computers.
One advantage remains: they’re more resistant to ESD & even EMP (from nuke bombs).
Did someone say “Tape Drives?”
The really old stuff was pretty wild. Racks of vacuum tubes. Memory consisting of columns of mercury. Huge rotating magnetic drums. Stainless steel mag tapes. Some of this equipment could be pretty dangerous to be around when it malfunctioned. All producing less computing power than is found in a dollar store wristwatch today.
A little obscure and somewhat bizarre history: Few people remember that the world’s first business computer was built in the late 1940s by a British catering firm, J. Lyons and Company. Called “LEO” (Lyons Electronic Office), the machine went online in 1951 and for a while Lyons (which was known mainly for its tea shops) was the worldwide leader in business computing.
http://www.leo-computers.org.uk/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEO_(computer)
Speaking of huge rotating drums…
I’m not old enough to have had any experience with magnetic drums, but my first boss did.
He told me story of a large computer project he was running in the 1950s, which required the use of a rotating drum for data storage. He had ordered this very expensive device months earlier, and it finally arrived from overseas late one Friday, just before closing time.
The warehouse personnel were aware of the importance of this device for the project, so they stayed late to unpack and inspect the shipment. To their horror, they discovered that the drum’s surface had rusted badly.
So they spent part of the the weekend polishing the drum until they could see their faces in it…
On Monday morning, they learned that the ‘rust’ was actually magnetic iron oxide that was essential to the drum’s ability to store data!
A good story, but I am skeptical. Unless the project was to build a drum drive, I think the drum with it magnetic surface would have been enclosed in a sealed cabinet and the warehouse people would/should not have opened it.
I agree that it sounds like an urban myth, but the person who told me the story was there, and his documented accomplishments during his long career make me doubt he would have any reason to make up this story.
But I can not offer any actual proof, so we’ll never know for sure…
OK, perhaps it was one of these link
Link is a clickable HTML reference to a picture. There are three HTML unseen elements (a reference, bold type and italics).
I’ve heard stories of those too. My grandfather on my Dad’s side was an industrial engineer, and at one point in his career he was in charge of projects setting up mainframes. He told Dad one evening of an install he was doing where one of the workers lost his grip on a drum storage drive while carrying it to its final location, and one edge of it hit the floor. This minor nick ruined the drive, to the tune of about $25k (in late 60’s dollars). I don’t know if the drum was in a cabinet or being handled directly, but either way, a small bit of damage caused a lot of money wasted!
(Being a computer person myself I wish I could have heard his stories in person, but he died when I was only 5.)
And of course, the first computer “bug” was an actual bug!
A moth at that.
I try to explain to my kids what it was like to use a computer 40 years ago and I get blank stares. Flow charting, writing programs, card punch, compiler, repeat until correct. I guess modern PC’s are like cars, you really don’t have to know how the parts work to use them.
K. Johnson wrote “Flow charting, writing programs, card punch, compiler, repeat until correct.”
Indeed.
Sometimes the “computer” was in a different building, so we had to drive the box of cards (aka the program) to the computer building, and then the delivery van returned it overnight. At best we got two compiles a day (if we hand delivered it once ourselves) and some compiler errors stopped the compile completely so we didn’t know if there were more errors further down in the deck.
One morning the box of cards came back crushed with dirty tire marks on it. It must have fallen off the van and been run over. I brushed and blew off the dirt, got a new box, hand checked the deck sequence, fixed the compiler errors, and then drove it back over for hopefully a second run.
All this waiting time is why we always had two or three programming projects going simultaneously.
Once we had a clean compile, testing began. One missing period in the testing fixes and we were back into the compiler phase again.
No rose colored glasses here.
Loved going to the Ham Radio Clubs Swap meet at Foothill College in Los Altos in the early 90’s All the surplus aka “Junk” from the major tech companies would show up by the Truck load. Russians and Eastern Europeans would buy and sell out of the back of old U-haul box trucks.
You would never know what you would find. I related it to diving for sunken treasure. Every time I went there I was amazed of what I would find. Almost always there would be at least 1 or 2 Main Frames with their guts scattered all over n the ground in the Parking lot where they held the meet. One Time I found a complete videocypher uplink console. These were being used by Showtime and HBO to encrypt their signals when they uplinked to satellite to prevent people from watching their signal received on backyard dishes. Old Nasa Tektronix vacuum tube oscilloscopes. I always wondered what missions or experimental testing they were used for. a lot of great memories of that place.
My father had 2nd hand computer installed in 1967 to replace the one they already had he lost a metre of office space to fit the massive IBM machine in, it had previously been at the Auckland BNZ bank main branch, several tons of equipment with less computing power than a phone nowdays it did their accounts only nothing complicated just adding and subtracting.
That picture of the CDC 6600 console brings back memories from my youth. As does its successor, the CDC 7600. My Dad worked a Commercial Credit Corporation (and what became of it) for just about his whole career (after a brief stint at the Social Security Administration until I was born).
He used to take me into work when he had to work overtime on Saturdays. At the ripe old age of 6 (in 1966) I learned how to use an IBM Key Punch Machine (pictured below). By the time CDC took over CCC in 1968, I had learned how to certify tapes, use a tape drive, and operate an IBM Card Sorter.
Sure, some may call it slave labor, and maybe a few child labor laws were broken back then, but I loved every minute of it!!!
When asked in 1978 (when I graduated high school) on an interview for my first engineering job at Black & Decker if I knew how to use a computer, I just looked at the interviewer and said with a straight face, “Well, I learned how to operate a key punch machine at the age of 6.”
Rick,
Oh, I used to play with the Card Sorter too when my dad took me to the office and his lab at Stanford. He worked at IBM in South San Jose – where they invented the disk drive – and Big Blue paid for his doctoral studies.
Are you from the Baltimore area? The SSA and Black & Decker kind of clued me in.
Yep, born and raised here and still live in the area!
Yeah, those big old main frames needed some cooling didn’t they? They were up on an elevated floor so you could remove the floor panels to get to the cables that ran underneath. When you removed those panels, an already extremely cold computer room got even colder with the improved return airflow you got from the missing panels. It was always freezing on the 3rd floor of 300 Saint Paul Street!
And all that for less computing power than that of the iPhone I carry in my pocket.
That’s an IBM 029, which I used in my 1st computer class. Hollerith punch cards (sized to fit early billfolds) date back to the 19th century, necessitated by America’s growing population & inability to process the Census within one decade. They are why your Windows Console & Macintosh Terminal still start up 80 columns wide by default.
This machine is solely responsible for destroying my social life while I was in college.
Oh I spent so much time in front of an 029 when I was in school. How sad is it that I still have my decks of cards?
My computer education began in high school in 1969. One of my classmates had dropped out and worked for IBM for a couple of years. They sent him back to finish his education. He decided all the nerds in my class needed to learn to program. The school had a bunch of KP026 and a few KP029 machines used for teaching keypunching. Guess which ones were always taken. The big difference was the absence/presence of a character printer along the top of the card. One quickly learned to read the holes. The card submit and return cycle was to the board of education mainframe downtown. Overnight service! BTW- this skill has faded like Morse code and semaphore.
These are splendid. The CDC6600 is perfect.
This all reminds me of the IVC 9000 2″ helical video tape recorders that I used to operate in the late 70s. The station I worked at in LA had three of them (only 65 were ever built), and they cost a whopping $50+k back then, which is like a couple hundred thousand now. All the editing was done on the fly, as these had ability for freeze-frame or slow-mo. Cue tones had to be precisely placed (with a button) while the machine was on the roll. But they had the best video quality in the world at the time. A bear to keep operating; very fussy.
Unfortunately there’s not one really good image to be found. This one is more recent, but lacks the monitors and the big 10″ reels.
We could only dream about what the digital revolution did…and we did dream and talk about it, because we knew it was going to happen. But it was impossible to imagine what today’s phones can do.
Great post. I love seeing old tech like this. As a musician I’ve always liked some of the classic modular synths, which these photos remind me of. The granddaddy of them all: The Moog Modular:
Looks like something out of the ‘space jam’ scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind!
I came into this world not long after the Apple ][ and Commodore PET, so for me those machines to me are like the 55 Chevys for you older folks. The 6502 CPU is like the Slant 6 of CPUs.
I’m glad people are now restoring some of these old machines like people restore cars. It’s really very similar in that something 10-20 years old is just a piece of crap, but if you go past that it’s worth something.
I had Z-80s (last I checked, derivatives still available from Zilog) but always respected the MOS 6502, which was cheap & simple like the old Chrysler compacts.
You can always get or write a virtual machine for those old boxes if you don’t have the hardware on hand.
I’ve messed around with a PDP emulator. It was fun although not really useful in any way.
The Z80s were definitely more complex. They were still used well into the early 90s- the original Gameboy used a variant as its CPU.
computing as we know it now:
the mother of all demos from 1968 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY
(requires patience)
When I was in the air force, and in Okinawa for a brief time in the early 1970s, the “computer” that supported our SR-71s was a maze of 7 USAF blue semi-trailers all hooked together outside our offices. The techs inside had to wear arctic gear as it was so cold in there, like 55°, where outside it was 90+ degrees with a dew point nearer 80°!
Me? I had to do all my graphic stuff by hand…
Wow. Lots of knowledge in this discussion. Anyone here know how to wire up an IBM wheelwriter as an input terminal for a Windows Vista PC?
Try this:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Remote-Serial-Console-HOWTO/rhl-biosserial.html
Long ago with MS-DOS, as a lark I used CTTY to redirect the console to an HP ANSI terminal. It worked but was fairly useless since most DOS screen apps wrote to video memory instead of using ANSI escapes as they should have.
Wow! Thank you!
I see C:/ panic pull the electric plug from the wall. All cured.
I attended a Fortran course at HSSP (High School Studies Program) at MIT on Saturdays back in 1971. I wrote a program to compute the position of a falling body vs. time (acceleration). My program was entered on cards (the only medium back then) and ran on an IBM-1130 a running disk operating System (as opposed to loading the OS via cards.