Can't resist nostalgia ----
Anyone out there go back to the RCA 301?  That was the thinking man's 1401 -
decimal machine, variable length records and fields, seven millisecond cycle
time, 10, 20 or 40 K torroidal memory.  It even read tapes backwards!  The
print table was in upper memory - don't remember why, but some programmers in
their assembler programs would do compares to the print table, a known set of
characters.  Going a step up in memory, 10 to 20 or 20 to 40K was a pretty
exciting time in the data center!