Sometime in the early 70s, a Honeywell division, one of our steady clients, called with a strange request. They had built a small number of special machines for the Navy. Now the Navy wanted more. Honeywell had the circuit drawings and the bootable tape (which they got from the Navy). They had no documentation (not even the instruction set). They asked us to rebuild the code. We did.
Dick.
I wrote a machine tool controller for the 4004. The Intel salesman told us we had one of the first chips in the Boston area. A little while later, he sold us the "first" 8008 in the area.
... for a grinding machine control in 1972. As I recall, the assembler ran on a commercial time-sharing system. The one I used was a PDP-10, but I suspect the assembler was written in FORTRAN, so it would run on any system of the time. I made it work on the prototype board, but the 8008 was out before it could be considered for production, so I ported it.
The RAMAC was a self-contained computer. It went nowhere. The drives that actually caused a change in computing were the 5MB "pizza platter" drives on the 360, 10 years after the RAMAC.
My college roommate used to go home one weekend a month to spend Sunday with his father (DP manager of a major company) backing up the RAMAC onto punch cards. He said it took all day and about 2 six-packs.
Dick.
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Sometime in the early 70s, a Honeywell division, one of our steady clients, called with a strange request. They had built a small number of special machines for the Navy. Now the Navy wanted more. Honeywell had the circuit drawings and the bootable tape (which they got from the Navy). They had no documentation (not even the instruction set). They asked us to rebuild the code. We did. Dick.
I wrote a machine tool controller for the 4004. The Intel salesman told us we had one of the first chips in the Boston area. A little while later, he sold us the "first" 8008 in the area.
Dick.
... for a grinding machine control in 1972. As I recall, the assembler ran on a commercial time-sharing system. The one I used was a PDP-10, but I suspect the assembler was written in FORTRAN, so it would run on any system of the time. I made it work on the prototype board, but the 8008 was out before it could be considered for production, so I ported it.
The RAMAC was a self-contained computer. It went nowhere. The drives that actually caused a change in computing were the 5MB "pizza platter" drives on the 360, 10 years after the RAMAC. My college roommate used to go home one weekend a month to spend Sunday with his father (DP manager of a major company) backing up the RAMAC onto punch cards. He said it took all day and about 2 six-packs. Dick.
Or couldn't they get an export license?