Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2012/12/27

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Subject: [Leica] Some artifacts at the Computer History Museum IMG:
From: billcpearce at cox.net (Bill Pearce)
Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2012 12:24:32 -0600
References: <B9188149-0D87-49FC-8D17-6D0E45E52936@acm.org> <764D0C4D-708D-4EA9-A41A-A6E5F32740A0@mac.com>

When I went to work in the airplane factory, the blueprint people were in 
the same place as the photo lab, and they were in the throes of converting 
from prints to microfilm (seems so archaic, no?), so some of us got the 
pleasure of spending downtime punching aperture cards, where a frame of film 
was in a cutout in the punch card. Presume all computer now.

-----Original Message----- 
From: Adam Bridge
Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2012 10:59 AM
To: Leica Users Group
Subject: Re: [Leica] Some artifacts at the Computer History Museum IMG:

On 2012 Dec 20, at 9:55 PM, Herbert Kanner <kanner at acm.org> wrote:

> After Hollerith retired, some investors who had already bought a company 
> that made time clock and a calculating grocery scale bought Hollerith's 
> company. Eventually they hired as CEO a guy who had been fired by National 
> Cash Register. That guy got rid of the clocks and scales and eventually 
> renamed the company International Business Machines, later renamed IBM. 
> His name was Thomas J. Watson.

I believe that IBM continued to make clocks up through the 1960s. Our school 
system had IBM clocks all synchronized.

Punch cards were in still in relatively common use through the late 1970s 
and early 1980s. As an EE undergrad my first courses in programming 
(FORTRAN) were on a B6700 whose input was on punch cards. However my course 
in assembly language was taught on DIGITAL PDP-11 minicomputers. But my 
course in circuit design used SPICE whose input was back to being on card 
decks.

A colleague worked with me to move SPICE over to the PDP-11 which was a very 
difficult task because the program was quite large, the amount of memory we 
had to work with was fairly small (64kb total for operating system and 
programs), and the tools were relatively crude. Ah, those were the days.

Today there's probably a version of SPICE that runs on the iPhone and is 
substantially faster than the mainframe version.

Wow. I think I'll go watch some "Dr. Who". Anyone seen Tom Baker???

Adam


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In reply to: Message from kanner at acm.org (Herbert Kanner) ([Leica] Some artifacts at the Computer History Museum IMG:)
Message from abridge at mac.com (Adam Bridge) ([Leica] Some artifacts at the Computer History Museum IMG:)