TranscriptMarch21-2007.html
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go to Team BiosTape Log - 1401 demonstration meeting March 21, 2007 10:30 Present: John Toole, Kirsten Tashev, Dag Spicer, Jim Somers, Jim McClure, Bob ?Fraly? Presenters: Robert Garner, Ed Thelen I, the transcriber, have taken considerable artistic license :-| - mostly "embellishing" the truth Because of the limited fidelity of the tape recording, and my ears, no attempt is made to identify the speakers - probably advisable in brain-storming? The use of the word "I" is the following transcription usually does *not* indicate the transcriber. The dialog was intense - contributions from all over, constantly Background: This is the second in a presumed series of discussions about effective means/techniques of presenting the 1401 to Museum visitors - the first was to Senior Docents http://ibm-1401.info/Sched2007February.html#03 this meeting to/with "senior management" --------- Thank you for arranging the meeting so Ed, my right and left hand assistant ... is head of the ?one? person demo committee What the demo might look like - the demo of the 1401 I'd like to have another meeting about Grant's ideas about how to tie in the 1401 roll-out with maybe the anniversary of the IBM 1401 announcement November 2009 Thats a topic for another meeting Maybe by that time the machine will be more reliable - maybe the time line will be available by then - I haven't broached the subject with the guys at IBM yet - Get us all on the same page - Our current goal of the 1401 team is "fixing" the machine to working order. If someone wants to repaint the machine later - that is another topic - There are two "systems" in the 1401 room- a) much of a "tab" room with key punches, sorter, merger, missing only the accounting/printing machine such as a 407 In a tab room, the various processes of say a billing operation are very visible - sorting, merging, accounting machine printing b) a complete 1401 system, with tapes, which replaced everything in a) above except the key punches. The above processes are largely hidden in the computer program. The previous discussion with senior docents had suggested that the two systems (above) be demonstrated separately because of the time and attention span required. People around the museum have been pressing for demonstrations of working unit record equipment. Demonstrations are very engaging for the visitor, a great teaching tool, fun to watch, ability to engage the visitor. Maybe 3 or 4 (tab) machines could be running on the time line. Maybe a non-working 1401 on the time line? The working 1401 system could be our museum's Van de Graaff generator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_de_Graaff_generator more of a diorama and its a show. The PDP-1 might be on the time line, and some restored micros - The 1401 could be its own show - off the lobby - needs more space. The time line will have lots of interactive, computer interactives lots of WOW factor. Lets think the working 1401 in its space, the unit record equipment in another space - ------------------------------- Present 1401 display capability the "big print" printout - similar to http://ibm-1401.info/NathanMGreeting01-.jpg Plan - to have 3 keypunches with the working 1401 for each visitor to use to keypunch his/her name into an IBM card. This IBM card, punched by the visitor, is inserted into a program/data deck and run through the 1401 and printed as above. What is more dramatic? We have been thinking of ideas, not about sequencing yet. We could also have a face - could the 1401 handle a low resolution camera to make the face of a guest? (With 16,000 characters of memory - the pixels would be maybe 125 x 125 - Hmmmm - but a lot of printer art was in that range - - maybe not in period/era ??? Key punching - takes a little familiarization to control the flow We had been thinking of gathering all the visitor punched cards, sorting them by first field, and printing a group of printouts without reloading the program deck each time. Birthdate - print out other people born on that date of the year, or born in that year. When the RAMAC was introduced at the Brussels World's Fair, people would ask a question and the computer would come back with great events in history (sometimes religious). And in 12 languages. We can The visitor will have to know who all these people are, public figures - famous people - the visitor might not know Don Knuth - who is this guy?? You guys should approve the names - nobody wants to know they were born the same year as Adolph Hitler. Maybe do 75 years - ?? 50 characters per year times 75 years is only 3750 characters - easily fits into current 8,000 character memory - yes we could do it - How do we get from this silly program to what the machine really did?? First phase is to explain the Relate to parts of current PC?? open it up, show the parts, memory stick (gigabytes) vs our 1406 box (12,000 characters) the memory stick has 75,000 times more capacity than the 1406 box Don't mock the past with these comparison. They don't make them like they used to. Who had this machine, and what did they use it for? Could you do a case study?? Which company used it for what? Maybe like Arnold who owned this machine before us - it was used at an insurance company? and when taken out of service, Arnold got it and opened a little service bureau - did payrole for small companies for 10 years - What about the 1401s used as print spoolers (and card readers) for faster machines? I sometimes talk about that when I have a 7090 next to a 1401 I can explain how it works - What was the ratio of 1401 as a business processor 1401 as a peripheral buffer, card to tape, tape to printer ??? Out of the 20,000 1401s sold how many were used as peripheral devices? How many 7090s were there? How many 1401s to service a 7090? I think the majority of 1401 were used in standalone business applications - Father / son update have printer print out run the cards against the tape and create a new one and at the same time you can be printing out some kind of reports. Are you volunteering to program this? We have a wonderful simulator available 1401 Software Development and by the way we can't compile a program yet - and to get an object deck we have to ship the code (by e-mail) to Cardamation in Pennsylvania - Once it runs in the emulator, it will run in our 1401 [ All better now :-)) ] Do we have software for this 1401 from other business? If we had software and data cards we could demo that - Could you join our team?? We need you !! We will have to talk to Al Kossow - the software currator - about that What I'm talking about is your basic father/son update programming you've got yesterday's tape, today's transaction cards, you make the new tape - and so you go from day-to-day each day updates the previous day's tape You can show how to do the electric billing - the meter reader comes by, the detail cards get punched, and that gets played against the master tape How many people running the job? There is one guy running it, but others are preparing card deck for example - so the cards are coming from some kind of accounting group which takes today's records and punches them into cards The operator takes the cards, knows what the job is mounts the father tape and a blank tape and runs the job through I have an idea - There is a whole interpretive movement in museums actually 20 years old - there is theatrical and (first person? ...) it has been done in history exhibits. ... All of a sudden there is this psychotic director casting a part for this play - people get chosen to play parts and he's got an assistant it is really very effective The stage is dark, the lights come up and this person comes in from accounting there is this guy who is running it who is a bit grumpy and thing always gets jammed and he starts talking to the audience and the lights change and he turn into an explainer and not the first person any more You have to hire an actor No you don't Hire a psychotic staffer - that is a lot easier everyone in this group qualifies ------------- Ron Mak - head of the software group - about 4 and you are invited to join is just dying to get on the hardware - Ron wants to have a programming class where people actually write little programs Maybe a summer came That is a way to get one of these programs created and working There is not a lot of original 1401 software available We could definitely put together a plan which can get better and better with time - I was working at a hospital in Denver and they pulled in a 360 there was one guy who kept writing 1401 AutoCoder programs ran AutoCoder (a 1401 assembler) in emulation mode - to make new 1401 programs to run on the 360 in 1401 emulation mode Eight years later I went back and they were still writing them How many years ago was that? About 1979 - much laughter - still writing AutoCoder I wonder how many AutoCoder programs are still running Oh - I just thought of another theater thing There is this salesman selling this machine to the audience saying all of these things and you get a couple of ads from the time, functionality, enlarged - Bill Selmeier where are you Then the operator comes in and he is cussing what is it going to take for you to buy this today Then at the end the operator can kill the salesman - One more demo we can add to this - we can take a box of cards - with this nice diagonal line lift it up to put it into the card sorter and have it fall - and do a floor sort So this can lead up to the alternate demo theater stage - talk to them about ideas tape cart moving ------------ As a point of reality, There are folks downstairs who worry that this 1401 will never be as reliable as they were known to be - Transistor leads corroded so badly as to finally open - has the corrosion stopped or merely slowed? We don't know - Let me talk about the status - Functionally everything we need to run the simple demos works "Works" means works at least once a day Temperature sensitive There are about 3,000 cards in the machine We found 100 bad cards amortized over 40 years, that isn't bad - We have gone from totally non-functional to functional Until we get the last problem out of the machine we won't know what the new failure rate is - We have gone backwards only once or twice - So until we get the new failure rate we won't know how robust the machine is from a demo perspective. Let me talk about the environment - this machine was stored essentially outdoors and the humidity in Germany is very high Here we don't have that, and less corrosive elements - I am trying to get some of my younger friends to work on a card tester - asking the volunteers to find one out of a hundred cards signal levels is too much - A semi-automated card tester We have a card extender to aid current trouble shooting. One card of a hundred failed in the past 40 years - May have to take the 1402 down for a month for a more complete overhaul - at Grant's -------------- What do you want to accomplish in the next 15 minutes? Rewrite the demo script to include these new ideas - birthdays stage one this (?big print?) plus the ideas we have heard stage two simple acting to make it more lively stage three real accounting demonstration Noise issues - 50 Hz power converter fairly noisy - the Liebert air conditioner is very noisy - we often turn it off so we can hear ourselves think usually the air conditioners were external to the old computer rooms the compressors, heat exchangers, circulating fans not in room we have our own fan noise from the fans in the equipment Printer is noiser than anything but in a demo that would be limited We may need a loud speaker, head phone how about a Madonna head set? We have a tube amplifier 35 watts of power We have CD-Roms and DVDs of sights and sounds which *really* need editing What would you use them for? when things don't work - If we have a demo scheduled, and things don't work we can show them movies - We have an extremely high resolution digital/audio recording unit now 196 kilo (bits/bytes) per second - in the humming bird range and if you wanted to record your own sounds - something for the visitor experience Editing - Do you have a MAC? no, but a MAC would be useful - put is on the shelf for now? Music, sounds RFI (Radio Frequency Interference) AM radio on top of the 1401, some guy in Iceland - we don't have the program Everyone ran it, we can't find the source code for it Maybe you could write the program?? The printer music we want to avoid, might break the chain - we are short of spares We can get them to agree to do it once - you bring down your 192 bit equipment Run the printer "music" and say that's it folks, end of the show :-)) AM radio is much better Did you guys listen to the NPR interview yet - no The only thing on that CD is the 1403, all the rest sounds like whales I am going to see if the San Jose Symphony will perform this in conjunction with the Computer History Museum that would be a big PR event - We can put the AM radio on top (of the 1401) and put it through the amplifier and we could play music at the end What tune do you want to play? Now we get a comparison/competition between the 1401 and PDP-1 sound One of us will talk to Ken (Summeral) Happy Birthday, find out what year or something silly like Chiquata Banana, Sound of Music, Beatles? context of its time, charts, 1959, what was hot? Elvis Presley ? How often can we get volunteers to come to demo? once every two weeks? When can we start ? Every two weeks Alternate between PDP-1 and 1401 When can we start? Birthday lookup program who can we get to find interesting birthdays? At least a month with no failures - ------------- Reconvene in a month - May ? Same people, plus Grant and Mike Cheponis OK - chow!! - - - - - - - - - Later "Random Access" ;-)) You should explain *why* the key punch, this was not the era of one person one computer This was also the era of batch processing no disc for quick access There were whole rooms full of keypunches talk about noisy!! So that the card reader that can go through 4,000 cards BLAM can be kept busy, and the very expensive machine can be kept busy There is a message buried in the fact that the keypunch is there! and if you are slip into the script the meter readers collected the data, data concentrated by the keypunchers, and concentrated into the once a day/week/month batch process One of placed I worked, even the programmers didn't keypunch write onto coding forms and pass them to the keypuncher Even into the 1980s I was hoping to farm out the actual script generation to the docents - end of tape - ----------------------- --------------------- Next meeting - May - I, the transcriber, invite this group to visit the 1401 on a Wednesday for say 1/2 hour for an informal tour and increased familiarization with the sights, sounds, possibilities of the 1401 - and keypunch a card ;-)) - before the next meeting - (And the troops would *love* the attention from the Museum !!!) (And Reduce the "them" vs "us" tendency.)