In the summer of '57, at the Southern California Cooperative Wind Tunnel, swing shift. Pay was $1.60/hr. + 0.12 shift premium. (Gas was about 30 cents / gallon).
Punching an electromechanical "square root Frieden". Weight about 50 lbs., price about $1600.
The "system" featured overlapped I/O:
remember previous result
Left hand:enter new caclulation, start
Right hand: write down previous result
while the gears churned...
The IBM 709/7090 / 7094 were
the Fortran machines of the day. They had
36-bit words to get enough precision to
do useful computation without resorting
to double-precision, which took longer and
swallowed too much memory (all 32K WORDS of it).
IBM adopted 32 bits with the System 360,
this was great for Univac which sold many
tons of 1107/1108 machines into the Fortran
market..
Nobody cared about characters..
the purpose
of computers was numbers....
For many years (maybe still) a Linker option
on Unisys 1100/ 2200-series programs is "AFCM" which stands for
"Arithmetic Floating Point Compatibility Mode"
and which guaranteed bit-for-bit compatibility
numeric results with the long-extinct 7094...
Slashdot Mirror
You've never heard of the "skin effect" ?
The "liner" is a very thin shell that
vaporizes before imploding...
I was one.
/hr. + 0.12 shift premium. (Gas
In the summer of '57, at the Southern California
Cooperative Wind Tunnel, swing shift. Pay
was $1.60
was about 30 cents / gallon).
Punching an electromechanical "square root Frieden".
Weight about 50 lbs., price about $1600.
The "system" featured overlapped I/O:
remember previous result
Left hand:enter new caclulation, start
Right hand: write down previous result
while the gears churned...
Umm, it was Admiral Byng and he was
shot on the quarterdeck of his own flagship.
IBM adopted 32 bits with the System 360, this was great for Univac which sold many tons of 1107 /1108 machines into the Fortran
market..
Nobody cared about characters ..
the purpose of computers was numbers....
For many years (maybe still) a Linker option on Unisys 1100/ 2200-series programs is "AFCM" which stands for "Arithmetic Floating Point Compatibility Mode" and which guaranteed bit-for-bit compatibility numeric results with the long-extinct 7094...