in the mid 90's I took a class at the local CC on Machine Shop,
lathes, mills, etc etc,


in the corner of the classroom was a vintage CNC mill,

most of the folks in that class were either machine operators of some type or supervisory position and needed to know the basics,


the guy teaching the class (ex NASA machinist) asked jokingly if anyone had experience with the tape machine that was used to program the CNC mill, cause it would make some parts quicker than we could for out project, ,


one dude spoke up and said yes,

so he spent most of the class typing up a tape(s) to feed the damn machine, and missed out on a lot of the manual machine time

quote:

Originally posted by IntrepidTraveler:
...High school, mid 70s, exact same teletype machine, but I believe it was hooked up to a PDP11, if this old memory serves...

It was maybe 1977 I was given an assignment at work, do the cost justification to purchase a removable hard drive for a PDP11 on a gov't contract. IIRC the cost was ~$25K, the capacity was about 2MB.

The cost/performance ratio has changed a bit since then.

I salvaged several tapes and 2 of the manual tape punches from the garbage during one of the several data center moves that I’ve been involved in.

My FIL worked on Univac, got a Smithsonian award for it a few years back. I also remember cake-box Winchester hard drives. Very odd looking back.

quote:

Originally posted by Scoutmaster:

quote:

Originally posted by IntrepidTraveler:
...High school, mid 70s, exact same teletype machine, but I believe it was hooked up to a PDP11, if this old memory serves...

It was maybe 1977 I was given an assignment at work, do the cost justification to purchase a removable hard drive for a PDP11 on a gov't contract. IIRC the cost was ~$25K, the capacity was about 2MB.

The cost/performance ratio has changed a bit since then.

The one I used had tape drives too, but the students' programs were saved to paper tape, We were told not to carry then in our pockets, as the paper tape was oil-impregnated to lubricate the tape machine.

I used to program a Bullard VMC with paper tape at Chiksan - now a FMC company - and then became the company's computer operator and FORTRAN programmer -> IMB 1130 with SSP using an IBM 029 card punch.

Ah Yes.

When I was in high school (late 70's), I joined the math-computer club - we had a 110 BAUD TTY machine with paper tape, EXACTLY like the picture motor59 posted. We also had an acoustic coupler modem with it. We used it for programming in BASIC.

Then in Fall 1979, I started out majoring in Electrical Engineering at University of Maryland. At that time, we used key punches and Hollerith cards, programming the Sperry Univac 1100 series, from the 1108 all the way up to the 1180.

I also had an operating systems class where we had to write an operating system for a PDP-11.

Pic from over 40yrs ago of me when 23yrs old and operating a Monarch VMC-150. The 6ft tall computer that controlled it is back over my right shoulder.

I wrote paper tape routines for machining various metal castings. Used a Flexowriter similar to the one motor59 posted on page one of this thread. Once the routines had been checked, they were then transferred from paper tape to more permanent Mylar tape. The tape was required to be mounted on the computer for each machining run. There was no memory in the computer. The tape was the memory.

Subsequently during my 20yr Naval career (1986-2006) a paper tape reader/printer was located aboard every ship and at every shore facility I served, along with other storage media of course. And I often still had hands on Mylar every time I picked up a floppy disk ... but incorporated for digital media as it were.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Hobbs,

quote:

Originally posted by IntrepidTraveler:
motor, where did you go to school?

High school, mid 70s, exact same teletype machine, but I believe it was hooked up to a PDP11, if this old memory serves.

Reading Senior High School, Reading PA.

Hamilton-Wenham Regional H.S., Hamilton, Mass.
This was '73-74 timeframe. There was one computer available for all students. As a sophomore, I wasn't supposed to get any time on it, but I was friends with the math teacher's daughter, and he let me fool around with it after school while he coached.

That tape was how we electronically transmitted parts orders and claims for loss,damage and monthly returns to General Motors Parts Division in the 70's. That or use the handwritten PC 66 or PC 66 A and mailed them in for orders. And PC 31,65 and 659 for shortage, damage or specific types of returns of parts.

quote:

Originally posted by braillediver:
In the USN we had paper tape machines. Vacuum tube gear and Nixie Tube displays.

Oh yeah. 14" reels of 1" wide tape. Changed a few thousand of them.

Even better, 5 level Baudot code on paper tape. Most of them punched on a Teletype Model 28 perferator. BANKS of the wretched things. When they were all working right (which wasn't often) I'd spend my watch in the Comm Center, loading up tapes on the DIN/DSSCS system. Baskets full of tapes to be sent every watch.

When they came out with the mod to bump the readers up from 300 to 1200 baud, we thought we'd died and gone to heaven.

Unclassified traffic was on yellow tape, classified was on pink. One of our favorite things to do to noobs was to dump the chad boxes from both machines into one burn bag then say "Oh, shit...I dumped the classified chad in with the unclass" and assign some poor seaman to separate it back out.

quote:

Originally posted by slosig:
Yes. I used paper tape in college to feed the G-code program into a CNC mill. Fun times. Definitely beats cards. Can you imagine dropping a stack of cards and having to put them back in order?

That's why one ran the (properly ordered) deck through a duplication routine that put card numbers in the unused columns so that they could be sorted back into order again. The numbers increased by 10 each time so that cards could be inserted for changes if necessary. (Removing cards did not upset the order.)

I began programming in 1959 and IBM cards were the rage then. In the late 1960s I worked with some USAF computers that used Mylar tape for data transfer (along with IBM cards). I believe one of them was a CDC 160 (or maybe 1600) that was used to translate input from the big Cheyenne Mountain machines to a form usable by the Athena guidance computers for the Thor rocket boosters out on Johnston Island. I was once given a task to come up with a way to do the CDC machine's work by hand if it failed during a mission setup. (I succeeded.)

aileron, in 1959 I was programming an IBM 650 with cards using an 026 keypunch machine. (I knew how to program it, too.) That was a weird machine--it stored and did its arithmetic in decimal!

In the early 1960s at a remote radar station I amused myself by visiting the comm center and playing with the teletype tape punches. I figured out how to type groups of letters such that the tape had English text punched into it.

flashguy

I was a Nuclear Medicine Tech from 1980 thru 2018. Back in around 1980 Ge had a Nuc Med Computer called the A Squared and later on updated to A Cubed. Had a 80 meg dual platter drive and a 40 meg cartridge drive. The unit also had a paper tape reader drive also. The unit was as big as two double door refrigeraters put together. Ran on Fortran language. Used that monster until 1990.

quote:

Originally posted by odin:

quote:

To re-run the routine we just loaded the cards

Ever drop the deck???? LOL Don't ask how I know!!!!

Quickly learned to draw a diagonal line across the top of the cards just in case.

quote:

Originally posted by Fredward:
My FIL worked on Univac, got a Smithsonian award for it a few years back. I also remember cake-box Winchester hard drives. Very odd looking back.

Do you know why they were calle "Winchester" drives? It's because the model number was 3030.

flashguy

quote:

Originally posted by flashguy:
<snip>
Do you know why they were calle "Winchester" drives? It's because the model number was 3030.

flashguy

The things one learns on SigForum!

quote:

Originally posted by flashguy:

In the early 1960s at a remote radar station I amused myself by visiting the comm center and playing with the teletype tape punches. I figured out how to type groups of letters such that the tape had English text punched into it.

flashguy

Whoa...flashback! I'd forgotten all about that. You can imagine the "messages" that got printed out.

There were several iterations of Model 28 Teletypes. One was the "ASR" or Automatic Send/Receive. It consisted of a keyboard, page printer, perferator and tape reader all in one cabinet.

After doing quarterly maintenance on an ASR, part of the check out included typing up a message on the keyboard, printing it on the page printer, punching a tape of it and reading the tape back on the tape reader. The usual "message" was a Quick Brown Fox test which uses all the letters of the alphabet.

I got in the habit of typing up the QBFT and adding a bunch of gobbledegook at the end. Meaningless until you looked at the punched tape...

quote:

Originally posted by odin:

quote:

To re-run the routine we just loaded the cards

Ever drop the deck???? LOL Don't ask how I know!!!!

No, but have seen MANY do so. My first exposure to computers was programming using FORTRAN IV on punch cards. Some of those card stacks were impressive. Especially if it was a class project to do a kinematics analysis on a system. And we did get pretty good at inserting "interesting" subroutines into card decks left unattended.

quote:

Originally posted by OKCGene:
When I was in College, late 1970's, I had a part time job at a Cardiology Clinic in OKC. They had recently purchased a Digital PDP15 (IIRC) computer Mainframe.

It was huge, took up most of a controlled room.

We used a PDP8 when I first got into heart research at Temple Med back in the mid 70's.

quote:

We used a PDP8 when I first got into heart research at Temple Med back in the mid 70's.

I remember the PDP 8! Our ME dept had one that very few knew how to bootstrap to get it running, that must have been my Jr year in engineering school.