Schedule July 2009
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Contents:
Wed July 1 - General, Thurs July 2 - Tape Team
Wed July 8 - General, Thurs July 9 - Tape Team, Sat July 11 - 2nd Sat
Wed July 15 - General, Thurs July 16 - Tape Team,
Wed July 22 - General, Thurs July 23 - Tape Team, Sat July 25 - 4th Sat
Mon July 27 - Ron Mak's class tour and follow-up
Wed July 29 - General, Thurs July 30 - Tape Team
Wed July 01 - general
- Working were: Ron Williams, Bob Erickson Bill Flora, Frank King, Glenn Lea, George Ahearn, Joe Preston, Don Luke, Bill Newman, Jim (Chip) Hunt, Ed Thelen, Robert Garner.
(Ron Williams said Ed Thelen spent so much time talking he should be listed as "Present". Ed says "I wasn't talking to myself, I had lots of company !!")
SMS Card Repair - We have a new "Dynamic Duo" - Jim Hunt and Bill Newman started right out checking/repairing our box of bad cards. 
They asked which cards had priority, and Ron Williams replied "TAU Cards" - meaning Tape Adapter Unit cards. The TAU has a rather unique series of SMS cards, and we have few to no replacements. This has been a real problem for the Tape People who work Thursdays (with days off for shooting rockets at Black Rock Desert.)
Bill Newman got into the on-line 1401 & 1406 Unit Plugging Charts, made a sorted list of the TAU cards - and went to work.
We are short of IBM type 101 - 107 transistors, and also don't have a cross reference for type 117 PNP type. Bill Newman knows of a "place in Oakland" and will try to increase our stock.- And of course we have bad news :-(( The next two cards they checked they reported "no problem found". :-((
This of course is a CE's bad dream - Send a card to HQ for repair, and have it returned "no problem found". The question is then:
- was the CE's diagnosis of the problem incorrect?
- was the testing at HQ not sophisticated enough?
- other blunder, card mix-up, intermittent bad connection, ...
Frank King reported that IBM's custom was to mark "no problem found" cards with a little black mark to warn the CE's. Frank King reported that if a particular card had two black marks on it, and "failed" again, the card usually received a final "accident" - like being broken in half. Ron Williams said this drove IBM management nutz - but if a $10 card is repeatedly causing a $500 service call - you choose what to do -- AH - SMS cards - We have had two big bunches, and a few trickles of SMS cards coming in.
The first bunch, with the German 1401, was placed in nice cabinets, with overflow of too many of one card type going into boxes. 
Clearly we have a CRISIS. Unlike California, we will do something.
The next bunch, with the Connectuccut(sp), you know what I mean, 1401, was placed in boxes - not much room in cabinet, we were busy?? And the boxes are no longer in order :-(( 
We probably won't have to spend the 834.5 billion, or is it trillion we have allocated for this CRISIS.
- Over the weekend, our staffers will draft a bill to resolve this CRISIS, maybe say 1,250 pages, like who is counting, or looking?
- Monday and Tuesday we will add maybe 300 amendments to make various voting and money groups happy,
- Wednesday morning the 1401 crew will have a few minutes to look at the probably 1450 page document, before voting YES on it
- Wednesday noon Robert Garner will sign the bill into law.
- I'm sorry, I mostly don't know what was going on in the rest of the room. Bob Erickson seemed rather slow about starting to take the IBM 519 Reproducing Punch transmission apart, again. Glenn Lea had a big motor out of one of the CT tape drives - said he was lubricating it.
Robert Garner reports "Bill Flora et all successfully read a 45-year old tape from our German buddies! It's labeled DFT (they were looking for full complement of DFT for 1401!) and "Aufbewahren" which means "save" or "keep" ! I believe this may be the first time we've done this (successfully)! 
The CT 1401 was or wasn't reading cards - it sometimes hung with a 1 bit in the instruction register - it should have been reading. Ron W and Joe P had a scope hung on this chassis. I commented that those yellow wires didn't look like they had been installed by GardnerDenver machines - Joe said they were Engineering Changes - and this is our "stock" 1401, without even Sterling arithmetic and Overlap :-| 
- Some docents appear to be unaware that the 1401 is being restored on Wednesdays, and that visitors are welcome. While wandering about I heard one family saying the father had worked on 1401s. I popped up and mentioned that a 1401 is being restored as we speak, by a bunch of old duffers like me. The docent seemed unaware that Wednesday is "OUR" day - I grabbed the family and they spent almost an hour with us.
Frank King and the father had a good time exchanging "war" stories. The mother had worked as a German translator and helped Frank with the German translations of 1403 documents. She also explained how Germans easily make words of 40 or more letters, the ending is the gender of the last word in the superword. 
From last Wednesday, Robert Garner
Ed - Bob looking over the 1406, with its temperature sensitive problem.
If Bob hadn't have had the enthusiasm to "look it over", I wouldn't have joined him in the hunt. When I did, I noticed the askew SMS card. After we removed it, we noticed its crack, which I verified with DVM was open or closed depending on bend angle... :-(
- OH - Bill Newman and Mattias Goerner are getting into 1401 software and Ron Mak's ROPE (Ron's Own Programming Environment). He took up Ron Williams' and Stan Paddock's challenge to do a one card 80-80 list program.
Bill Newman is just getting started in the debugger tool in ROPE.
Matthias got stuck trying to cram it all into one card. Eventually Van Snyder was called in.
Thursday July 02 - Tape Team
Wednesday July 08 - General
- Present were: Ron Williams, Bob Erickson Bill Flora, Frank King, Allen Palmer, Glenn Lea, George Ahearn, Joe Preston, Don Luke, Bob Feretich, Stan Paddock, Sam Sjogen, Bill Newman, Jim Hunt, Ed Thelen, Robert Garner.
- The tape crew showed up to hear a presentation of the new path ahead by John Hollar during the Brown Bag Lunch at noon. They stayed busy well into the afternoon.
To complement the IBM Time Clock, Stan brought in some time cards, and a time card rack. 
Look at that!! John Hollar (CHM CEO) is "on the clock" just like "the rest of us." !! 
Jim Hunt got right to work fixing cards !! No grass grows under his shoes!! His techniques are not very sophisticated yet - He finds and replaces lots of transistors that fail simple ohmmeter checks. 
- Bob has determined that after 2 or 3 weeks the oil pump pump in the IBM 519 Reproducing Punch looses its prime, and will not pump oil again until manually primed :-((
Fake smiles - Bob Erickson [left] and Glenn Lea are manually priming the oil pump, again. 
Further disassembly - Bob is trying to drive out a taper pin, Glen hopes to catch it. 
The side of the transmission is OFF. A view of the oil pump 
This is the inside of the oil pump. The rotor is offset and the little vanes push the oil. 
What is wrong?? Something worn, out of tolerance?? This unit is being shipped to Grant Saviers for return to functionality. - Dr. Mike Williams dropped by to visit with the troops. Mike had been CHM Head Curator a few years ago. He has since served as (roving?) editor of the IEEE computer publication "Compute". This is a 2004 photo, Mike in the left center. And a 2004 photo, Mike on the right.
Bob Feretich and Sam Sjogen visited the RAMAC crew. Here [left to right] Joe Feng, John Best, Dave Bennet and Dick Oswald view John's Black Box to drive the RAMAC controls. 
Bob Feretich showing off the 729 Tape Emulator Black Box 
Thursday July 9 - Tape Team
There was no meeting -
Saturday July 11 - 2nd Saturday
Working on the CT 1401 and 1402 reader were: Ron Williams, Bob Erickson.
- Playing at making an interesting user-interactive 1401 demo were Stan Paddock and Bill Newman.
- Researching transistor substitutions were Ron Crane and Ed Thelen (from 2 -> 4 )During the morning Ed Thelen had been casting about the Internet for a good substitute transistor for the IBM type 112 transistors which Jim Hunt had used up last Wednesday. [Jim emails me that it was a 102. Apparently a bit flipped in my noggin. I should start taking notes!! or get memory parity !! Fortunately the substitution list indicates the same replacement.] The suggested replacement in the Transistor Replacement document is the 2N705. Venders on the Internet want $6 to $8 each. That seems an excessive ripoff, as much nicer modern transistors retail for $0.60 each - and we tend to buy transistors in bunches of thirty. I suppose $180 isn't all that much - but it rankles. An engineer ought to be able to do better than that. Unfortunately, the really nice modern transistors can be "too good", such as cause accidental triggering of flip-flops, or oscillations and/or ringing in circuits designed for the older "less good" lower performance transistors.
For instance, a favorite story - The General Electric Computer Department production line was shut down for more than two weeks when a new batch of TI transistors (with much "improved" characteristics) were inserted into the printed circuit cards. All kinds of horrible things happened in the logic - at the ends of long ringing wires, AND logic became OR logic, ...
Ron Crane volunteered to come in at 2:00 to lend Ed a hand at selecting a substitute transistor for the IBM 112. Ron found this April 2006 e-mail he had written.
The silicon transistors in these two drawers should be used for higher speed circuits, note that in differential pairs both must be of the changed out for proper operation.
Ron Crane bought 30 more 2N2894 from Halted and placed them in this drawer. Transistor Replacement updated.
Wednesday July 15 - General
- Ed sent a note to John Hollar CHM President & CEO, informing him that he was "on-the-clock" and should start punching in and out.
John replied
Ed: Thanks for the heads up! This sheds a whole new light on my morning routine. I hope I can remember to �clock in��at least on Wednesdays.
I was on the clock once before, about 30 years ago, when I worked summers at a small grocery store in my hometown of Pampa, Texas. A dim and dusty memory at this point!
Having a clock is another great feature of the 1401 room, Stan. Thanks for all the effort you put in to make that happen.
Best regards
-- John
- Present were: Ron Williams, Bob Erickson Bill Flora, Frank King, Don Luke, George Ahearn, Joe Preston, Don Luke, Stan Paddock, Sam Sjogen, Bill Newman, Jim (Chip) Hunt & Grandson, Robert Garner.
This report dictated by Ron Williams to AWOL Ed Thelen over the phone. Any garbling of fact into fiction will be blamed on technology ;-))- Likely progress on the CT 1402 Card Reader/Punch. Among many mysteries, some blue cards had more trouble being read. It turns out the the blue cards are just slightly wider that the usual cards, and it was noticed that they were being hit just slightly in the card picker station by the joggler. This was causing them to bounce slightly and one of the picker knives occasionally missed picking one side of the card, causing a skew and trouble further down the line. There is talk of shimming the joggler assembly to provide more clearance. This may explain the extended and chronic intermittent read check stoppages.
This is Bill Flora's machine, but about half the crew spent quite a bit of time eyeballing and discussing this discovery. Anyone not listed below (and some that are) spent a lot of time on/near the 1402.- Don Luke, jack of all trades, helped Joe Preston with a key punch, helped Bob Erickson with the 513, and enjoyed the 1402
- Bill Newman was busy with the curve tracer, examining transistors
- Jim Hunt and his grandson fixed 4 or 5 SMS cards. The grandson solders transistors :-))
- Joe Preston started struggling on another 729 tape drive. He replaced the main circuit breaker, a dud, then found another circuit breaker feeding one of the power supplies had an open current sense coil. Working parts came from the "spare parts" 729.
- Stan was active on the PC in the entry way, and entertaining guests. Stan has been e-mailing folks about clever and/or not obvious 1401 programming techniques.
- Sam was busy with the German 1401 and printer, also getting into Card Code to BCD conversion.
Thursday July 16 - Tape Team
Wednesday July 22 - General
- Present were: Ron Williams, Bob Erickson, Bill Flora, Don Luke, George Ahearn, Joe Preston, Don Luke, Stan Paddock, Sam Sjogen, Bill Newman, Jim Hunt, Robert Garner.
Ya know, Joe Preston just keeps pushing along. No jokes, no tall tales, ... He apparently comes to CHM to fix stuff, and is not easily distracted. :-)) 
I don't even know what this is and why it is here :-(( 
- Talking about serious - another couple of guys - well, I guess most of the guys are serious. Maybe it is just Frank King and I that will pause to tell a tall tale, or three? This is embarrassing :-((
Like Jim Hunt and Bill Newman fixed some more cards - ran out of replacement diodes :-((
Life can be tough. The CT 1402 card reader has been "fixed" I don't know how many times. - But the next week some new problem pops up - in WW II, it was gremlins, do we have a new scape goat? 
For lunchtime entertainment Ron Mak gave a warm-up of the lecture he is giving at San Jose State to 60 students on Monday morning. In the afternoon they will visit CHM and the 1401, and I presume other sights also ;-)) 
And this is where pounds sterling is computed in the German 1401. 
This is a timely e-mail about the Sterling option - from Charles Morrrison via George Ahearn
I joined IBM Greenock Scotland in 1964 and do not remember Greenock building the 1401. We were building the 026 and 056 punch and punch and verifiers. I would guess that the engineer from UK that helped with the design of the sterling feature would have been from the dev. lab at Hursley. In the computer room, Greenock had two 1401's and a 1410 for running the sites programs. I spent two years in the programming department writing programs for the 1401 for the finace department so had plenty of experience of using the sterling feature (12 pence in a shilling, 20 shillings in a pound). I found the 1401 a great and easy system to write programs for. I attach a photo of a 1401 bound for the Qatar Petroleum Co. being loaded aboard a plane at Frankfurt airport. 
Thursday July 23 - Tape Team
Saturday July 25 - 4th Saturday
- This report is from Ron Williams, via Ed Thelen
- Present were Ron Williams, Bob Erickson and Bill Worthington
- Ron Williams and Bob Erickson worked on the CT 1402 card reader - and made another discovery -
An idler/follower wheel in the card path was deformed/badly flattened. As the wheel is a different diameter than the drivers wheels, the flat spot affects different cards differently - causing apparently random errors.They inserted an idler wheel that had been previously made round - and the machine appeared to now read cards error free.
- Bill Worthington led a number of demos using the DE 1401. The demos included young people keypunching their own names into IBM cards. The cards were input into the 1401, and their names appeared in BIG PRINT on the 1403 printer.
The audience was delighted :-))Jim Somers (volunteer coordinator, among other things) observed, and later complemented Bill Worthington on the performance :-))
- Steve Russel's new developing 026 How To Keypunch was sent a day after this demo. It should provide easy guidance for the novice keypunchers ;-))
Mon July 27 - Ron Mak's class tour and follow-up
Monday July 27
From Ron Mak
I will teach a 90-minute class on the IBM 1401 to top computer science students from San Jose State University, Cal State Long Beach, Arizona State University, and an engineering school in Switzerland. I plan to discuss the machine's unique architecture, its pioneering role in the history of modern computing, and how to program it in Autocoder (with demos of our simulator environment). This will take place at San Jose State University campus on Monday morning, July 27. In the afternoon of the same day, the 60 students and their 10 faculty members will visit the Computer History Museum. Of course, after my class, they will want to see the 1401 alive and in action.
So we need volunteers who are willing to come in that afternoon and run the 1401. Please let Robert or me know if you can do it. This will be a great opportunity for a large group of very interested students to learn about our machine. We'll work out how to break them up into groups and cycle them through the machine room, the Babbage difference engine, and the exhibit hall.
The class I will teach at SJSU can be a prototype for a class we eventually teach at the museum. I may want to do a dry run at the museum before I give it at the university. I normally teach compiler writing and software engineering part-time in the CS department, but I may get the opportunity to teach a semester-long course on the history of modern computing.
-- Ron
P.S.: More information about the students and their summer exchange program:
During each summer, a group of computer science students and faculty from San Jose State University, Cal State Long Beach, and Arizona State University get together with CS students and their faculty from La Haute Ecole d'Ing�nierie et de Gestion du Canton de Vaud (HEIG-VD), a Swiss engineering school (http://www.heig-vd.ch/). The students take short courses taught by faculty members from all four universities on topics like security, networking, enterprise software development, open source, multi-agent systems, and ubiquitous computing.
See http://cs.sjsu.edu/~pearce/summer09/index.html for the announcement about this summer's exchange program, which will be held at the SJSU campus. Dr. Jon Pearce, the professor in charge of the program at SJSU, is scheduling visits by the students and faculty to various high-tech Silicon Valley companies. Their schedule is at http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/pearce/summer09/sched/sched.html. (The seminar in the morning of July 27 is my class, and the afternoon visit to the museum is listed as "Tech Museum".)
Ronald Mak
Department of Computer Science
San Jose State University
http://cs.sjsu.edu/~mak/
The seminar that I gave yesterday morning about the 1401 at San Jose State University went very well.
The audience was 60 international senior and graduate computer science students from San Jose State, Long Beach State, Arizona State, and HEIG-VD, an engineering school in Switzerland. Then in the afternoon, they all visited the Computer History Museum where they saw the equipment I had discussed in my seminar. Seeing and hearing the restored IBM 1401 in action was a really big hit!In the morning, I had given each student a punched card containing his or her name. They brought their cards to the 1401 machine room where we ran the Big Print program to print each student a personalized listing. The 1402, the flashing console lights, and especially the 1403 were the stars of the show. Stan Paddock, Bill Worthington, and George Ahearn did fantastic jobs running the demos and explaining what it was like back in the good ol' days.
After yesterday, the students should understand what data processing was like before the 1401 and how the 1401 changed things. At the very least, they ought to appreciate their laptops more!
The website for my seminar is {San Jose State has deleted the link}. You can download the PowerPoint slides and sample Autocoder programs that I presented.
-- Ron
Wed July 29 - general
- Present were: Ron Williams, Bob Erickson, Frank King, Joe Preston, Don Luke, Bill Newman, Jim Hunt, Ed Thelen, Robert Garner.
(George Ahearn and Stan Paddock had come in Monday (above) to docent 60 of Ron Mak's students - but since we are not paying double time for over time ;-)) they didn't appear today.)- Jim Hunt fixed 11 SMS cards - 9 bad transistors, 1 open 56 uH inductor, 1 GE point contact diode. We are running out of selected types of spare transistors. Off to the Internet for more equivalent types.
Jim has some wild and wooly tales of debugging new microprocessors. Looking for photons sometimes emitted when electrons and holes re-unite, looking for 2 volt changes in surface charges with electron probes, making holes (with e-beams?) through the back of silicon substrates to "look at" deeply buried structures. I hope I remembered the above relatively correctly.- Back to SMS card storage, inventory, accessibility - Maybe we are not utilizing the existing drawers fully -
The top 2 drawers are too shallow to store SMS cards in the compact manner as the following lower four drawers.But we do have a problem, we are just about out of separators for inserting more SMS card types (our equipment has about 230 SMS card types). See Card name vs # in 1401/1406 & 729 Mod 5 vs # in Spares for details. As mentioned elsewhere, the card inventory from CT did not get merged with these cards and documents - work yet to be performed -
Top useable
2nd
3rd
4th
Cutting/Bending heavy sheet metal is not currently attractive - maybe plastic sheet stock for added separators?
Currently a "red dot" on the SMS card type label indicates that more of the same type are available in other boxes.
Talking with Frank King about the above problem, he reminded me that SMS cards are in more placed than I inventoried - like in the regulated power supplies, 3 in the 1403 printer (two shown here, one buried too far to bother now), and one in the 1402??? 
- We entertained much of the RAMAC crew again, this time including Al Hoagland. They are a really interested, informed, savvy audience :-)) Maybe because a slightly modified 350 RAMAC could be attached to a 1401 system as a 1405.
Unfortunately we cannot find schematics for the 1405 controller, or Ron Williams might have fabricated such - he had helped check-out and ship 1405 equipped systems.- The rest of the crew spent quite a while trying to figure what was causing one of the 729 rewind motors to overheat - the current thought is that a leaky transistor is causing a relay (which powers the motor) to act erratically. Unfortunately, we do not have a spare card nor equivalent transistor yet - next Wednesday for sure?
Thursday July 30 - Tape Team Van Snyder's response
|
TAU Debug Status Report 2009-07-30
- (Bob F. and me) [and Allen Palmer and Ron Williams] Our main work last Thursday was getting diagnostics to run from an emulated tape drive. Bob had given me a bunch of diagnostics in .crd format. Using a C program I wrote to convert from .crd to ASCII (note that deckview.exe does not produce usable ASCII card files for SIMH), then using SIMH to run the programs to produce .mt1 tape files, and finally using SimhConv.java to produce .tobj virtual tape files for the emulator, we got diagnostics to run on the real 1401. We created separate files with groups of diagnostics for CPU, RPP (Reader, Punch, Printer), and Tape; we named the files DiagCPU, DiagRPP, and DiagTape.
Initially, the following CPU tests ran without error:
Then the diagnostic
began. As it appeared that the diagnostics were working properly we left a printout on a table for the rest of the team to use in debugging (subsequently thrown back in the printer output stack -- see below).
However, I went back and used the .mt1 version of DiagCPU on SIMH to
verify that the diagnostics were working properly. The
Diagnostics that fail before the machine check are
Diagnostics that succeed are
The test
We found that some diagnostics are missing entirely. These are
I will review my CardToSIMH program to see if there is an error
there. I'll also examine the 5300-5320 files that are placed in front
of the rest of the diagnostics to load and run them. If anyone would
care to help out by scanning the ASCII versions of the card images,
let me know. Attached to this email are
In addition to Bob's previous note on CT system tape channel termination: NOTE: THE CT SYSTEM'S TAPE CHANNEL IS NOW TERMINATED BY THE 729 EMULATOR. EMULATOR POWER MUST BE ON FOR THE TERMINATORS TO WORK. EMULATOR POWER IS ATTACHED TO THE POWER OUTLET OF THE NEAREST TAPE DRIVE, SO IT WILL POWER ON/OFF WHEN CT SYSTEM POWER (The wall breaker, not the Ops Panel switch.) IS CYCLED. DO NOT TURN THE POWER SWITCH ON THE FRONT OF THE EMULATOR BOX OFF. I'll repeat a finding from a previous debug session, a case that I ran into on one of my previous Wednesdays when we were getting garbage from the emulator: NOTE: THE TAPE DRIVES ON THE CT SYSTEM MUST BE POWERED ON TO USE THE EMULATOR. IF TURNED OFF THEY WILL AFFECT THE TAPE CHANNEL IN SUCH A WAY AS TO CORRUPT DATA BEING SENT TO OR FROM THE EMULATOR.
Cheers,
Diag0230A
Diag0230B
|
I made up a test tape with 0050B, 0060B, 0100B, 0110B, 0210C and 0230B and ran it in SimH 3.8.0. 0210C and 0230B failed. 0210C failed because of incorrect encodings. Group mark was encoded as ", not }, and record mark was encoded as ', not |. When I fixed that, only 0230B failed. 0230B failed because its detail cards are set up for Europe. MCS in USA replaces high-order zeros and commas by blanks. MCS in Europe replaces high-order zeros and periods by blanks. So the 0230B deck from Arnold will fail on the CT machine unless you make copies of the detail cards with "." replaced by ",:". When I did this, 0230B works in SimH. Other diagnostic programs (Move Characters and Edit?) might have the same or similar problems. The program that gets written on the beginning of the test tape, and that reads the diagnostic programs and executes them, rewinds the tape and starts over when it reaches the end. If you wrote the tape with 5300E/5310E, booting will stop with ASR = IAR = 1369, at which time you're expected to set sense switches and set "interesting" memory locations. If you want to print the headers for each diagnostic program, patch a 1 into 1252. If you want to halt at the end of the tape, patch a halt into 1287. Others are described in the diagnostic programs manual. Disassembled versions of 5300E and 5310E are attached. A Readme file for 5300/5310 is also attached. Also the deck I used to create a diagnostic tape, the diagnostic tape (in SimH format), and output from a run. Van attached files: |
and
> > The .mt1 type file is not ASCII > and must be accessed by FTP or what ever The .mt1 file is a SimH tape file. You should be able to do "save as" from your mailer. Don't try to do "show inline." A dumper is attached. If run with no command-line arguments it prints its usage. Usage: ./tpdump [options] |
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