40 Years of Unix

S/360 certainly shipped before Unix and yes:

Quote:

---

In 1965 IBM released the 2741 terminal. It was basically a selectric typewriter that directly (and digitally) interfaced with mainframes.

---

There is one in that picture that I linked to.

The idea of paper tapes and cards was a reflection of the computer environment of the day. A lot of data preparation was by agencies and the processing by bureaux (shades of "cloud computing" :D) and paper tapes and punched cards were the most cost effective way of preparing and transporting the input data.

That's kind of neat, I didn't actually know there were actual Shells / Command lines back before Unix / MULTICS. I thought they started that idea. Ah well.

I know the KR-35 or whatever was what was considered a standard way to talk to Unix for a while. The New Line made physical movement. They talk about it briefly in "The Complete FreeBSD". Good book.

A couple of off topic but somewhat related items:

I believe it is also the 40th anniversary of Arpanet?

I read somewhere that Bletchley Park have just started to restore a 1951 computer used in our atomic weapons programme. It has 900 cold cathode tubes for memory which would be about 370 bytes by todays reckoning :D

It used paper tape for program storage, data input and output.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09..._to_bletchley/

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1....htm?s_cid=259

Basically it was no faster than a human with a mechanical calculator, but did not make mistakes and could run for days on end.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by nihil

A couple of off topic but somewhat related items:

I believe it is also the 40th anniversary of Arpanet?

I read somewhere that Bletchley Park have just started to restore a 1951 computer used in our atomic weapons programme. It has 900 cold cathode tubes for memory which would be about 370 bytes by todays reckoning :D

---

You know what? I would love to pay to see a demonstration of these paper/punch machines, especially the Apollo one's. And how the machines IBM produced work to help Germany track Jews and other minorities.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Linen0ise

You know what? I would love to pay to see a demonstration of these paper/punch machines, especially the Apollo one's. And how the machines IBM produced work to help Germany track Jews and other minorities.

---

I think you mean the Nazis. Hitler was Austrian, and a lot of Germans didn't like him or the Nazis (Like MY family who fought on the American side against him) for fear of being killed for saying something against scheissekopf. That's why they refer to it as "Nazi Germany" because like with Bush, he may have been in charge but a lot of people in the country didn't like it. Of course we're allowed to speak poorly of Bush without someone killing us for it.... Gestapo would murder anyone who dared say anything bad about their ways or what they did. If you want to know where the Nazis who were let off went, well, check this side of the globe. Some got off scott free and a bunch ran down to Mexico.

Also, what other minorities are you speaking of? A mad man who stole his position before most of us were even born tried to tell everyone else that a certain race was better than another. Which is crap. Nihil would be speaking German right now had it not been for the fact that the HUMAN race beat the hell out of the master race.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by gore

I think you mean the Nazis. Hitler was Austrian, and a lot of Germans didn't like him or the Nazis (Like MY family who fought on the American side against him) for fear of being killed for saying something against scheissekopf.

---

I agree with your statements. But I referring to the technology back in the days. I wonder what can be accomplished with those ancient machines in a 8-hour workday. The Navy knows how I felt about Bush ;)

Well, as I see things, the IBM punchcard machine was the start of automated database management systems.

We already had manual stuff such as Cardex and Rotodeck, but this was the first electro-mechanical system. I also regard it as database management because it was driven by codes that allowed automatic sorting and selection, rather than just making the manual look up of records more efficient.

The paper tape computer I mentioned was actually no faster than a human over a short period of time. However, it could run 24/7 or until it ran out of paper tape; and it never got tired or made mistakes.

Back then we weren't looking at mips or megaflops..............we just wanted improvements on what were essentially tedious, repetitive, manual operations.

What the Germans used it for is pretty much irrelevant? hell! I have a Mauser '98 and have never killed anyone with it...........neither has anyone else to my knowledge ;)

EDIT:

Quote:

---

a bunch ran down to Mexico

---

It was South America actually. The Germans already had expatriate populations and business interests down there.

Places like Paraguay, Uraguay, Chile, Brazil, and Argentina.

I spoke to someone recently who worked in finance who used those ancient machines at an automotive company. When they were bored, they programmed the machine to divide a million by 1. The computer worked all night trying to figure out the solution. Probably was exaggerating but definitely made a point.

LO,

Quote:

---

The computer worked all night trying to figure out the solution. Probably was exaggerating but definitely made a point.

---

Sounds fast to me, given that it would subtract 1 from 1,000,000 one million times, computing a subtotal each time.

If "all night" is 8 hours, then it was doing around 35 calculations a second.

Try that with an add-listing calculator set to print subtotals :D even with repeat calculations turned on and just using the display, you won't be able to do more than 5 calculations a second?

Handling the paper input/output was certainly the bottleneck with those old devices. :)

God this thread makes me feel old.

Quote:

---

I would love to pay to see a demonstration of these paper/punch machines

---

Gore you may appreciate this. The summer of my Freshman year in High School, I used to take a bus downtown to Wayne State and hang out in the computer lab. I was kind of the adopted geek kid and that summer I learned COBOL. Programs were written on coding forms, punched on to punch cards, and loaded into the computer.

You only dropped your stack of punch cards ONCE. Because there really wasn't anyway to put them back in order. It was easier to start over!