Ah, the 64k memory box...  Memory was called "core" not "RAM" back then.
Why?  Because every memory bit was a tiny magnetic donut called a "core",
hand strung at the factory with 2 wires -- one horizontal and one vertical.
The refrigerator sized cabinet not only housed this core memory, but a large
oil tank and pump to keep the core memory cool.

Anyone seen the precursor to disks?  Magnetic drum storage.  The control
hardware was much simpler because there was exactly the same number of bits,
traveling at the same speed, no matter where the data was on the drum.

I loved to load those paper tapes on the optical reader having sat at a
teletype 'forever' waiting on the attached mechanical readers!

Speaking of paper tape, anyone ever have to bootstrap a machine by entering
data/address pairs through toggle switches on the front panel to load the
operating system's boot program off paper tape?

And then those new fangled floppy disks.  At 8 inches square, they certainly
were floppy!  Anyone use those data entry desks with built in 8" floppy
drives?  Another new fangled invention by IBM:  96 column cards!  Remember
those?  Not the standard rectangular 80 column ones with rectangular holes
designed for mechanical readers, but the little square ones with round holes
having 3 sets of 32 characters stacked, and designed for the fancy new
optical readers.

Another joy:  VTOC (Volume Table Of Contents)!  No segmented/paged files!
You had to have a current printout of the VTOC to find a 'hole' between
files big enough to hold the new file you wanted to add!  Or, do your own
garbage collection by moving files around, one by one, to make a hole big
enough, if there was enough free space.  You had to be careful of which end
of the file and copy direction when shifting files to close small holes, as
the copy function would happily copy a file into the middle of itself -- no
bits to waste protecting the machine from stupid human mistakes! ;)

Anyone remember when techs carried oscilloscopes and logic gate charts?  I
can remember helping techs find problems using the logic gate charts to
trace down problems in the hardware.  Ah yes, the "good ol' days" of nand
gates!

I'm too "young" to have used those IBM "computers" that used patch panels
for programming them, but I saw a few of them in the surplus corner of the
Northrup computer room.  Now there was a computer room!  I stood on a chair
to look across a sea of IBM mainframes, seemed to be larger than a football
field!  In the center was an operator circle:  monitors stacked 3 high above
a ring of keyboards, and operators in wheeled chairs sliding back and forth
on the inside of the ring to attend or check one of the dozens of monitors.
And then at the far end of the room, a tape vault manned by 2 or 3 tape
librarians behind a dutch door, and a semi-circle of refrigerator sized tape
drives fanned out in front of the door, with tape drive operators running
tapes back and forth between the vault and the tape drives.  Most massive
computer room I have ever seen.

On the other end of the size spectrum, anyone ever have the opportunity to
program an original Altair?

Remember when Hazeltine was the king of the CRTs?  Man, what an improvement
over punched cards, especially for a poor typist like me!

Pete

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