Subj : Email Clients... To : Rich Wonneberger From : Peter Knapper Date : Thu Jul 28 2005 12:26 am Hi Rich, RW> Did it come on 9 track tape, punch card, or paper tape?? Punched Tape..........;-) And don't laugh, but I was working with punched paper tape on my very first day at work. It was one of these - http://www.beagle-ears.com/lars/engineer/comphist/c20-1684/fig089.jpg RW> (Was there anything else back in 65??) Look out... I am about to drift down memory lane here... In fact that site - http://www.beagle-ears.com/lars/engineer/comphist/c20-1684/ contains an amazing collection of info and pictures relating to the EXACT hardware that I cut my computing teeth on. I later worked on a 360/30, 360/65, 370/145, 370/165 (later upgraded to a 370/169 using 3rd party memory expansion), then a 3033, 3031, etc, and then I forget all the other models. My very first computer that I ever saw and touched was an IBM System 360 Model 40 CPU, with 128KB RAM, 1 x 2501 Card Reader, 1 x 2671 Punched Paper Tape Reader, 2 x 1403 Printers, 1 x 1419 Magnetic Character Reader (for reading the MICR codeline on bank cheques), 9 x 2314 Disk drives, 3 x 2401 Magnetic Tape Units, 1 x 1052 Selectric Typewriter Console, 1 x 2701 Communications Controller (driving 1 x 40.8Kbps Data Circuit to Auckland that in 1971 was the fastest data circuit in the southern hemisphere), 12 x 2740 Remote Terminals, and a 7770 Audio Reponse unit. The later Communications related items were ground breaking stuff in their time... Ahh yes, those really were the days of understanding how computers worked, you could actually SEE the electrons running around. And yes, I really did use and know what all the lights and switches did on the front panel of the computer, binary coding for entering patches directly into the processor memory at run time. All good real hand-on stuff... The CPU used REAL CORE memory, and its Microcode was stored in TROS (Transformer Read-Only Storage) tapes. Effectively the TROS held the machine instructions of the computer (this was before microcode) and was built as a stack of layers of plastic strips with copper runs that had holes punched in the copper all arranged in a block around a ferite core forming a huge sort of transformer. This manually asssembled block was about 18 x 3 x 2 inches and weighed about 20-30 lbs. I remember our IBM engineer stripping the TROS stack down once and replacing one of the layers of plastic, its copper strip had "heat fractured" and was causing CPU Checks (a forced H/W halt condition) about 45 minutes after the weekly power up on Monday morning. Ahhh yes, those were the days of real computing.........;-) Cheers..............pk. --- Maximus/2 3.01 * Origin: Another Good Point About OS/2 (3:772/1.10) .