Computer Pioneers - Pioneer Computers Part 2 - YouTube
Fascinating stuff. Thanks for the pointer. One of the unsung heroes of those early computers were the oscilloscopes that had to be developed to look at the pulse timing. You see lots of the early scopes in the photographs. Peter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsirYCAocZk --- Talk Mailing List talk@gtalug.org http://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
-- Peter Hiscocks Syscomp Electronic Design Limited, Toronto http://www.syscompdesign.com USB Oscilloscope and Waveform Generator 647-839-0325
On 04/19/2015 04:27 PM, phiscock@ee.ryerson.ca wrote:
Fascinating stuff. Thanks for the pointer.
One of the things mentioned, but not described was the "Williams tube", which was a type of memory based on a CRT, with the phosphor decay time being used for storage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_tube They also mentioned delay lines. I used to work on some video terminals that used a delay line, though a coil of wire was used instead of mercury. Incidentally, I aslo used to work on an ancient "Teleregister" computer, located in the basement of the old stock exchange building at 234 Bay St. It was a single purpose computer, as was common back then, which was used to transmit stock prices to brokers offices. It was built with vacuum tubes & relays and had a memory drum. I recall gapping the heads, with a piece of bond paper, between the head and drum. That system was older than I was.
Not quite as visually compelling as the video, but pretty deep given their multi-decade history, is the BCS's Computer Conservation Society <http://www.computerconservationsociety.org/index.htm>. Unsurprisingly, it's got a heavy UK focus. It does occasionally dig into Canadian issues, partly because of the Canadian Ferranti-Packard company's design for the ICT (later ICL) 1900, arguably the UK's most successful mainframe. Their journal, /Resurrection/, is very often an interesting read. The current issue, aside from big iron restoration efforts, covers the pre-history of the Raspberry Pi: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/CCS/res/res69.htm I'm kind of glad I missed out on the delay-line memory days. I /just /remember magnetic bubble memory, but only as it was fading out. cheers, Stewart
On 04/28/2015 09:40 PM, Stewart C. Russell wrote:
It does occasionally dig into Canadian issues, partly because of the Canadian Ferranti-Packard company's design for the ICT (later ICL) 1900, arguably the UK's most successful mainframe.
Years ago, when the Toronto Stock Exchange was at 234 Bay St., they had a FP 6000. While I didn't work on it, some of the equipment I worked on was connected to it. Incidentallt, the Wikipedia article I linked to also mentions the Air Canada reservation system. I worked on a later incarnation of it, which ran on a Collins 8500C system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferranti-Packard_6000
On 04/28/2015 09:40 PM, Stewart C. Russell wrote:
I'm kind of glad I missed out on the delay-line memory days. I /just /remember magnetic bubble memory, but only as it was fading out.
I used to work with core memory in some computers. That stuff ran about $1 per byte. I also worked with delay line memory in video terminals.
On 04/19/2015 05:18 PM, James Knott wrote:
On 04/19/2015 04:27 PM, phiscock@ee.ryerson.ca wrote:
Fascinating stuff. Thanks for the pointer. Here's another one.
Try again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiRgdaknJCg
participants (3)
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James Knott -
phiscock＠ee.ryerson.ca -
Stewart C. Russell