[PLUG] Terabyte paper tape

Thu Sep 23 03:54:30 UTC 2021

All of this brings back fond memories of my time at DEC in San
German PR. I started out as a service tech in the plant. They hired
a group of 11 of us. I got on because the guy who worked on the
model 33 and 35 tty's knew me from being a ham radio op and I
also had a collection of model 15 and 28 tty's. I started out being
taught the goings on of the PDP8, been a long time ago but recall
pulling CORE memory out of a machine after loading a routine in
it and moving it to another machine, booting the machine and off
went what was in core memory. Also remember the PDP 8 test
stations in the test area of the plant, we used to tell the test folks
not to step on the heavy cables that ran from a pdp11 out to the
pdp8 test stations, we would tell them that in stepping on the cables
they would block the electron flow....

Late on a got moved into QC, we had the lowest reject rate in all
of the DEC production plants. I also helped my buddy with the
printers, the Teletype machines always wanted to have a nice oil
bath. Getting across the 20 or 60ma loop was not fun either it would
clearly light your day up, especially if it was carrying data.

When I was moved into memory test we had a large 6 ft rack of
pcb cards (flip chips) and a PDP11. You would plug a memory
board into it and run a test, it would give you the timing of your
memory as a graph, you wanted to talk to the memory as near
as possible in the middle of the graph that sort of looked like an
eye (not quite an eye pattern but sort of an eye, the more open
it was the less likely to have data errors moving data in and out
of the cores.  This test machine had a fan fold of code kept in the
bottom of the rack. If it had issues which you could not figure out
you would pull the fan fold out and start going down through the
code, at the very end of it was the instruction to take a 2x4 which
was hanging on the side of the rack, and whack the rack, the whack
was to be given exactly where the instructions said to do so, usually
if it got down to that, the whack would take care of it.

I recall building a batch of pdp8 machines on a special weather proof
mount for putting on a tractor, they were sent to Ireland where they
were mounted on tractors as part of a potato separating machine as
the potatoes were turned over by the tractor. I also recall the vibration
table breaking a couple of times, the fix was to put an inverter in a
car and put a machine in there clamped down to the floor of the
back of the car, then drive down the roughest road we could find.

Also remember the hard drives for the PDP10 that accounting used
they were the size of a top filled washer and had a similar lid on them
you opened the lid grabbed a handle gave it a turn and pulled out
the whole disk which was more like an upside down wash tub.

Ahh paper tape. We had some machines (burpees) that punched
at 1200 cps...  It was sort of a screaming noise. Yes a lot of smell
of electronics with oil.

Those were fun times.

On Wed, Sep 22, 2021 at 8:07 PM Ben Koenig <techkoenig at protonmail.com>
wrote:

> People talk about old tech they same way they talk about fast food.
>
> Gone are the days when a burger would be eaten with both hands. A bygone
> era when a man would stand by the quality of his work, truly committed to
> quality.
>
> We live in an era when technology is shrunken and diminished. With a
> single hand we grasp a shortlived device designed to be used and discarded
> as quickly as the box it came in.
>
> The computers of my generation are gimped, handicapped machines made to
> exist as a node in an infinite network of communication protocols. What was
> once a puzzle is now a debate, and arguments have replaced conversations.
>
> On paper, I work with computers every day. But in reality 90% of my time
> is spent proving who is responsible for a bad Customer Experience.
>
> It would be nice to spend some time in a room filled with analog devices
> and paper storage media. The same tech used to split the atom and visit the
> moon..
>
> After the testing I recently did on some Macbook M1 laptops going back to
> punch cards sounds like an amazing idea.
>
> -Ben
> Sent from ProtonMail mobile
>
> -------- Original Message --------
> On Sep 22, 2021, 5:36 PM, John Sechrest wrote:
>
> > I remember that the first task in a new computer installation was to get
> > the manuals set up. We often had 5-8 ft of Manuals that came with a
> system.
> > So upboxing the manuals and setting them into binders was almost as big a
> > task as getting the computer set up.
> >
> > They used to build reference manuals and Users guides with the full
> > expectations you could find what you needed, since there was no network
> and
> > every good manual page read was one less support call.
> >
> > On Wed, Sep 22, 2021 at 5:33 PM Tomas Kuchta <
> tomas.kuchta.lists at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> >> You did not miss much.
> >>
> >> The old tech sucked. I was (un) fortunate enough to experience it, both
> at
> >> home and work.
> >>
> >> About the only good thing about it was its simplicity and openness.
> Most of
> >> the ancient computers came with awesome manuals for both HW and SW. It
> was
> >> so easy to learn and understand. I guess, that the same could be said
> about
> >> today's tech albeit at different abstraction level.
> >>
> >> -Tomas
> >>
> >> On Wed, Sep 22, 2021, 11:34 Atharva Lele <itsatharva at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> > Hello,
> >> >
> >> > Reading all of this is really so interesting to me! I was born in 1998
> >> and
> >> > I feel like I've missed out on so much!
> >> >
> >> > My first computer was an Intel Pentium 4 with 256MB RAM and 40GB HDD.
> >> > Hopefully I'll get to at least tinker with some of the old tech!
> >> >
> >> > Regards,
> >> > Atharva Lele
> >> >
> >> >
> >> > On Tue, Sep 21, 2021 at 11:43 AM Daniel Ortiz <
> >> > elamigodanielortiz at gmail.com>
> >> > wrote:
> >> >
> >> > > If it is desired or decided to try to replicate the experience of
> paper
> >> > > tape coding then theoretically Google's teachable machine could be
> one
> >> > > component used to accomplish that:
> >> > > https://teachablemachine.withgoogle.com
> >> > >
> >> > > On Tue, Sep 21, 2021 at 11:02 AM Russell Senior <
> >> > russell at personaltelco.net
> >> > > >
> >> > > wrote:
> >> > >
> >> > > > You can still get the clack-clack-ding-ding without the hardware:
> >> > > >
> >> > > > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd5oomwEBb0
> >> > > >
> >> > > > but it's hard to replicate the smell of paper tape.
> >> > > >
> >> > > > On Tue, Sep 21, 2021 at 4:08 AM Keith Lofstrom <keithl at kl-ic.com>
> >> > wrote:
> >> > > > >
> >> > > > > "My first computer" was a DEC PDP8 at Tektronix, which I
> >> > > > > was allowed to use at age 16 in 1969. The programming was
> >> > > > > language was FOCAL. No disk drive - I/O was an ASR-33
> >> > > > > teletype, and a "high speed" 60 character-per-second paper
> >> > > > > tape reader.
> >> > > > >
> >> > > > > I compare that to my new 80 gram, 1 Terabyte SATA3 solid
> >> > > > > state drive. A terabyte of paper tape would fill a cube
> >> > > > > 20 meters on a side, weigh more than 10,000 metric tonnes,
> >> > > > > and take 530 years to read.
> >> > > > >
> >> > > > > Not all was bad back then. The lawns we kids were told
> >> > > > > to get off of were larger.
> >> > > > >
> >> > > > > Keith
> >> > > > >
> >> > > > > --
> >> > > > > Keith Lofstrom keithl at keithl.com
> >> > > >
> >> > >
> >> >
> >>
> >
> > --
> > [image: www.seattleangelconference.com]
> > <http://www.seattleangelconference.com/>
> >
> > *JOHN SECHREST*
> > *Founder, *Seattle Angel Conference
> > TEL (541) 250-0844 EMAIL sechrest at seattleangel.com
> > Schedule A Meeting <https://sechrest.youcanbook.me/>
> >
> > http://seattleangelconference.com
> > @sechrest

-- 

Chuck Hast  -- KP4DJT --
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