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Forum Index : Microcontroller and PC projects : IBM 1401 running FORTRAN II
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Grogster Admin Group  Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9754 |
This is really rather interesting. To think: The Micromite has more processing power then the entire room of computer racks. IBM 1401 Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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| Boppa Guru  Joined: 08/11/2016 Location: AustraliaPosts: 816 |
And just a tad cheaper too.... |
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goc30 Guru Joined: 12/04/2017 Location: FrancePosts: 435 |
on the first image of the video, we can see on the left, an oscilloscope. At that time it was the most important tool, because we depannait to the component. We took the lot of the schemas, and we followed the signals, then we unsoldered the defective component (like 7400) and we soldered the new.  |
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| Phil23 Guru Joined: 27/03/2016 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1667 |
@Grog, That reminds me of the BHP days. Check out the floor; those tiles. Back in the day you pulled them up with a sucker things to get at all the cabling that was laid underneath. Cheers. Edit.... Gotta love those tape drives & how the had the loops sucked down in the channels & shuffled it back & forward. |
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| Boppa Guru Joined: 08/11/2016 Location: AustraliaPosts: 816 |
Think of the power that monster used to run itself and all its accessories, the micromite can do it faster and better off a single lithium battery..... Amazing how far we have developed... |
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| Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9754 |
@ goc30 - Yes, indeed. We hardly ever service to component level anymore. If something is screwy with a mainboard, and it is not an obvious and easy fault, we bin the faulty board and replace with a new one - job done. Servicing to component level is almost a lost talent these days.  @ Phil23 - Yes, those vaccum tape drives are impressive to watch. There are other videos on that same channel, of them fixing all the broken bits on one of those tape drives, and getting it going again. I think that 1401 exhibit is a reasonably serious rebuild of all the core components. It was a 1960's computer with lots of moving parts, so.... It's great there are still teams of people prepared to keep these old historic computers running.  @ Boppa - Yes, just a tad cheaper!  I hate to think of how much juice these big machines used to suck. I expect it more then just a couple of kW with everything running! It is videos of old computers like this, which really hammer home to me just how far we have come the last 50 years. If I may paraphrase you for just a moment.... Look at all the stuff we have now, like Cortana and the Invoke stand-alone Cortana box - that is impressive speech recognition technology, and very Star Trek. The voice synthesis is very impressive now, and Cortana sounds like a real woman, not like a jerky computer voice as we had before. VERY Star Trek."Computer: Have I always been the only crew member aboard?" "Affirmative." "Do I have the necessary skills to operate the ship single-handed?" "Negative." "Then why am I the only crew member aboard?" "........That information is not available." Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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| JohnS Guru Joined: 18/11/2011 Location: United KingdomPosts: 4133 |
Ah nostalgia :) Leo Also, Baby / SSEM And Colossus etc John |
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| Paul_L Guru Joined: 03/03/2016 Location: United StatesPosts: 769 |
Yep ..... that's about what I saw back in 1957 at Cornell. Programmers did a lot of walking around in those days, and boy were those band printers LOUD. Paul in NY |
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| Hatrick Newbie  Joined: 16/11/2015 Location: AustraliaPosts: 6 |
Brings back memories of time I worked on the hardware of some Univac 418-III back in the early 70s. Most of the 18-bit processor was discrete transistors, with a small amount of TTL for a fast cache memory (tho many mainframes were using predominantly ICs at the time). The main memory was of course magnetic core, which could be expanded out to a max of 128K 18-bit words. Those tape drives bring back memories! The hard drives were the washing-machine style with large 20-layer discs as a removable pack. The actuator for the flying heads was hydraulically driven, at amazing speed to give 20mS access. A whopping 30MB of storage! Gerry |
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