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What Does It Take To Keep a Classic IBM 1401 Mainframe Alive? (ieee.org)
"Think your vintage computer hardware is old?" writes long-time Slashdot reader corrosive_nf. "Ken Shirriff, Robert Garne, and their associates probably have you beat.
"The IBM 1401 was introduced in 1959, and these guys are keeping one alive in a computer museum... [T]he volunteers have to go digging through historical archives and do some detective work to figure out solutions to pretty much anything!" Many things that we take for granted are done very differently in old computers. For instance, the IBM 1401 uses 6-bit characters, not bytes. It used decimal memory addressing, not binary. It's also interesting how much people could accomplish with limited resources, running a Fortran compiler on the 1401 with just 8K of memory. Finally, working on the 1401 has given them a deeper understanding of how computers really work. It's not a black box; you can see the individual transistors that are performing operations and each ferrite core that stores a bit.
"It's a way of keeping history alive," says one of the volunteers at Silicon Valley's Computer History museum. "For museum visitors, seeing the IBM 1401 in operation gives them a feeling for what computers were like in the 1960s, the full experience of punching data onto cards and then seeing and hearing the system processing cards....
"So far, things are breaking slowly enough that we can keep up, so it's more of a challenge than an annoyance."
"The IBM 1401 was introduced in 1959, and these guys are keeping one alive in a computer museum... [T]he volunteers have to go digging through historical archives and do some detective work to figure out solutions to pretty much anything!" Many things that we take for granted are done very differently in old computers. For instance, the IBM 1401 uses 6-bit characters, not bytes. It used decimal memory addressing, not binary. It's also interesting how much people could accomplish with limited resources, running a Fortran compiler on the 1401 with just 8K of memory. Finally, working on the 1401 has given them a deeper understanding of how computers really work. It's not a black box; you can see the individual transistors that are performing operations and each ferrite core that stores a bit.
"It's a way of keeping history alive," says one of the volunteers at Silicon Valley's Computer History museum. "For museum visitors, seeing the IBM 1401 in operation gives them a feeling for what computers were like in the 1960s, the full experience of punching data onto cards and then seeing and hearing the system processing cards....
"So far, things are breaking slowly enough that we can keep up, so it's more of a challenge than an annoyance."
The first computer I ever used was a 1401 (at Rice University in 1963). As an undergrad, I only got computer time early in the morning (0700hrs), and usually had to turn the thing on, then wait 30min for it to warm up.
It was punched-card input and punched-card output; only grad students could use the console typewriter (a real flailing-arm typewriter, not a Selectric).
But I taught it to do my engineering homework (FORTRAN; not even FORTRAN II). I graduated with a masters in ME, but I was an aerospace programmer for 46 years. Never did a lick of engineering.
My first job (before I graduated) was as a computer operator trainee, working for IBM at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, in the Real Time Computing Complex, 1st floor of bldg 30, Mission Control. That room had 5 IBM 7094 mod II machines, to do the real computations, and 2 IBM 1460 machines (1401 big brother) to process the input and output magnetic tapes for the 7094s, so my 1401 experience paid off.
One day I was about to be late for work, for an important test. I ran into the building, down the hall, and turned the corner to the right, and ran smack into someone running around the same corner in the opposite direction. I knocked him down. I reached my hand out to help him up, about to apologize profusely, when I realized it was Gus Grissom. Being a computer operator, working on a very cold floor, we all wore Hush Puppy shoes (thick foam soles; insulators). He was wearing leather-soled brogans, so he went down. As I helped him up, I said, "Ohmygod, I've broken government property. Sorry; I'm late for a test." He replied, "Me, too! You do good, OK?" Four years later, he burned to death in the Apollo fire :(.
I went on to work in Flight Software for the Viking Program Mars lander, and to install a computer at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, on the occasion of shuttle Discovery's maiden launch. It was stupendous.
So, thank you lowly 1401 for giving me a jump-start to a wonderful career.