1401 Demo Meeting Feb 3
Who - Ed Thelen "Works" on 1401 Restoration at CHM What - Presentation to Senior Docents about opportunities presenting - some IBM Tabulating Room equipment - and the IBM 1401 system that replaced the above Why - Prepare for turn-over of equipment, software, materials for presentation to the general public How - Prepare plans and further needs (documents?, communications?) I plan to make a "trip report" of this meeting to aid memories and further dialogs. How soon available? Light at the end of the tunnel :-)) ? months? We are working on: - stability (it breaks too much) - finishing more tape drives Contact - web site - http://ibm-1401.info/index.html or Google - 1401 restoration - e-mail addresses near top Greetings: Robert Garner was also going to be here today - but he has a life - Robert and 3 others purchased this 1401 system and gave it to CHM Here is a current status report from Robert. ----------------------------------------- Outline of this presentation - physical resources for display - demonstrations we have available and/or thought of - ask about docent plans and time constraints - solicit comments, questions, suggestions, ... - schedule more dialogs? ------------------------------------------- A) The existing facility has Floor space (standing) for about 10 guests to hear and see - 2 concurrent demos during Vintage Computer Faire - ?proposal move ?1401 and floor to store area? B) Inventory of material present - some with plastic covers Lovely room with period raised floor and access ramp 1400 data processing system (plastic ends) 1401 processor (4,000 characters/bytes) 1402 reader/punch (tough to do covers?) 1403 printer "line printer" (open the lid - no covers) 1406 extended memory (12,000 characters/bytes) 729 tape drives (five of three different models) (plastic sides soon) A wall chart describing the data processing equipment (real soon now) Tab room equipment 026 key punches (two) 083 card sorter (?1,000/min?) 077 collator (plastic covers) (250/min) future dream 403 Accounting machine Various scopes, tool kits, spares, work benches, ... Various static exhibits of core memory, stretched mag tape, SMS card, vacuum tube punched "IBM card", print out of line printer, A variety of movies on DVDs showing the insides of Tab equipment at work - these are much too long, but could be edited into something a techie mechanical engineer could appreciate ;-)) - copies of CHM property - IBM 026 KeyPunch - IBM 402 - Accounting Machine - IBM 557 Interpreter 50 Hz power supply, air conditioner (noisy!!) ?A Public Address system - over the noise? -------------------------------------------- C) Inventory of actions available Guests may - key punch their names into IBM cards we have two (three?) key punches it takes a little getting used to: feed, register, punch, release register, release - Presenters may present Tabulating room functions - provide key punch familiarization feed, register, punch probably best manual operations - show sorter in operation either TV (one column) or actual multicolumn (say two column) - show collator operations Merge two sorted decks - - one color master cards - another color for detail cards master and detail cards - explain a payroll or billing operation ideas almost identical two sorted inputs - Master cards, Detail cards merged into customer oriented stream calculate and print customer oriented stream (no machine - have to use imagination) separate out the Master and Detail cards 1400 system operations - card read demo - fast reader 800 cards/minute three color deck into three different pockets - print demo - faster printer 600 lines/minute powers of 2 or something - Ripple read deck optional print everything, ripple demo - read & print - faster thinking, can multiply, divide :-)) - 729 tape read card, write to tape, back space, reead, compare write/read, print both fields - combo demo with guest names read into machine and printed out (hand out to docents - same hand out to guests) - rattle tapes - pseudo sort? - a short sort operation - read say 500 pseudo "random" cards in outputting in strings to tapes - succession of merges and sorts - print final sorted "random" cards ------------------------------------ D) I think we have way more available than 90 % of guests have time and inclination for. Now comes the social engineering What makes a good tour for who? We dream of: - attraction new maintenance people - holding software classes ------------------------------------------------ E) Plans by docents to present the scope and sequence - we hear a special tour is envisioned similar to PDP-1 how much of which to show - tab room - 1400 system separate tours? - time constraints - range of guest interests Other comments? F) Follow on discussions, e-mail, ... -