The great thing about the IBM 1403 was you could tell which report was printing, or even a core dump, just from the sound. If you were running a job and the job cancelled, you could tell almost immediately because of the distinctive sound the dump makes. Plus, when the printer runs out of paper or forms, the hood would open. That way if you were working all night printing forms for like, a bank's end of year statements, you could load the forms, start the printer, lower the hood, and lean your office chair back and lay your head against the printer to get 10-15 minutes of shut-eye in between boxes of forms. When the box emptied, the hood would open and wake you up and you could load the next box of forms and continue the print. The IBM 1403, the model 26 keypunch, and the 2501 card reader/punch were common when I was a computer operator between 1973 and 1977 when I became a computer programmer.
I used a lot of that equipment at the Navy Supply Depot, Yokosuka Japan, 1978-81. Our division Chief had basically a death threat on us for all the times someone left a coffee cup on the printer hood, which would then tip over when the hood opened. You never saw so many guys running and diving so fast to grab that cup before it tipped.
@@HelloKittyFanMan. One example: Aboard ship in the Navy we printed paychecks using a payroll program that applied the name and pay due to a pre-made form, connected like paper, which could be fitted onto the printer by adjusting for the width.
Wow, @@deraldporter3828, almost a year ago stupid TH-cam never notified me of your reply here! "Connected like paper"? Were the forms made of fabric? I really doubt it.
Such a blast from the past! My Navy outfit had 2 1401's in 1962. We used "Autocoder" programing language. My whole outfit were complete geeks. Thanks for the memories.
Autocoder was just like any other assembler (SSPS was other popular option), so not really a proper programming language but a symbolic assembler.. Autocoder was kinda advanced as for such simple machine, quite close to modern assemblers, It could even use custom libraries for various stuff. I was running both SSPS and Autocoder on emulator. Too bad I can't afford to go there and run some program on real 1401...
I started working at IBM in 1964 and worked on dozens of 1401 systems. I never imagined seeing my old work place represented in a museum! I joined the Computer History Museum and attended numerous events, and halped with the Memorex at 50 celebration. A great place to visit if you ever worked around computers.
I could still change a box of paper with my eyes closed.change print chain, and punch prepare a new carriage control tape... I was 18 years old when I ran all this equipment... wow.. funny to look back.
What a *gorgeous* machine. I’m grateful to have joined computing in the early 80s during the home computer boom, but how I wish I could have experienced the big iron era. If I lived in Mountain View, I’d buy the old timers dinner every week and just let them talk about these monsters. Thanks for sharing, Ken!
"In the sixties women did all the keypunching." Except in the military. I had the misfortune of being a customer engineer on an army base and the soldiers (male) beat the hell out of the mechanical keyboards. In accounts where the keypunch operators were exclusively women the keyboards never gave any trouble.
I got my start in computers in 1968 when I was 12 years old. My dad was a Statistician for Southwestern Bell in St Louis. He let me program the 1401 computer in the Business Research Division on weekends. I learned Fortran II and Autocoder, which was a macro assembler. Later in 1975 I attended Control Data Institute, where we worked on an old CDC 3300 Supercomputer. Later I became a Field Engineer for Tandem Computers, and then a contract programmer for the next 20 years. Amazing to see where computers have come from then.
I learned computers in 1977, in the Navy. We had a class on the unit record equipment, and we actually did program those wire boards a few times. On the sorter, the instructor told a good story where he had a big deck of cards, all different colors, and that the sorter could sort by color. Of course, each colored card had 1 column punched with a different value for different colors, and BOOM - all the blue cards came out in the same slot, etc...Great times.
What a cool demo!. I spent several years programming the 1401 and its big brother the 1410 (which had I/O channels that could generate interrupts). One footnote to the 1401 demo -- IBM had a program called the "1401 report program generator" that facilitated the conversion of the wired control panel "programs" for punch-card accounting machines shown in the demo to 1401 programs. You described the inputs, outputs, totals, subtotals, etc. and it generated the 1401 program automatically. Another footnote -- there was a machine that looked like a keypunch called a "verifier." After a program or some data was keypunched, the deck was was fed into a verifier, and the operator rekeyed it. The verifier caught discrepancies between the punched cards and the rekeying. Verifying doubled data entry time, but saved computer time which was valuable in those days. It was also kind of a status symbol if you were important enough to have your programs verified :-).
Great Demo. Brought back memories of when I used to operate a 1401 back in 1969 - 1970 when I was working for IBM. The one item that the commentators failed to mention was how long it took to run an application. For example, to process an AIC (Automatic Inventory Control) report for an automotive dealership it would take 6 to 10 hours, depending on the size of the dealership. Furthermore, if there was a tape drive read error at a critical point in the run, you had to go back to the previous month's input tape, re-run that entire job to create a new tape, and start the current month all over again.
First computer I worked on in 1965 at Ford Motor Company at Halewood plant in Liverpool England. I finished working in November 2019 still in IT at the NAB (bank) in Melbourne Australia.
In my early career the 1401 was our input/output device. We used it to load punched cards to tape and print output stored on tape. Main computer was an IBM 7080. BTW, it was a Navy installation and we had a card deck for the 1401 that would drive the print head of the 1403 at various speeds so that we could get it to play “Anchors Away” when the Brass visited.
Great presentation! Awesome to see the real thing! This show had everything i tells ya! A little tech, a little mechanic, a little electronics, and a little sexism! Boy, the 1960’s had it all.
A close friend of my fathers used to work for a bank (I can't think of the name) back in the mid 60s, he used the IBM 360s to write a program to keep records of sales etc for Shell gasoline. Usually something would go wrong once ever one or two weeks and he'd get a call in the middle of the night to take the next flight out their and fix whatever the problem was and then fly back home sometimes the next day. The funniest part was how he talked about the computer room being about the size of a few offices when he was hired and by the time his contract ended the whole office floor was the computer room and about 1/4 to 1/2 of it was the giant cooling system they had to use to keep the machines running.
yèàh 360 370 big dèàl in University IBM had graduates used to equip so good for sales - they never mention idiot operator errors - they happened çàlgàry
As someone who worked in an IBM 604/420/077/080/520?/026 setup, followed by 609/421 etc, then ICT 1900 series I was in awe of the 1400 and 360 series. From a plugboard grafter!
Wish u made more content like this it’s super interesting and could possibly help kids understand technology better, breaking down old computers helps to understand wtf a computer does nowadays, we just shrunk them down
The 1401 was the first computer I learned to program. Watching this video takes me back to the '70s when they were being phased out by my company for system 360. The 1401 used decimal addresses for its storage; the 360 used binary, and addresses were expressed in hexadecimal. They still are and modern computers still use this mathematical base.
All these old machines bring back memories. I worked on an IBM 370 and 4341 with punch cards and printers like that. The 4341 I used 3270 terminals with Cobol and CICS to send the info to the correct terminal.
I was starting my 5.67 years as a Physic/Mathematics Dual Major in Fall 1966 at UCLA (I could take the bus right from there to a few blocks from my and my parent's home; very convenient, since I did not have a car until later). As I explored my new school, I went to the rear of the new Student Union building, which looked south down a hill to the two huge Mathematics and Engineering buildings. I noticed a lot of work was being done on a new glass-sided multi-story building bridging between the two older buildings. This went on for several weeks and then I saw that the building was full of students and I walked over to it and asked what they were doing there. The new building had two (not one, but TWO!) huge IBM 360 MODEL 95 "super" (for the era) computers that it turned out that IBM had sold UCLA for a rock-bottom price. Each one looked a little like the IBM 1401 in style, with huge dark blue cabinets, many large reel-to-reel tape drives (I did not see any card reader/writers, but they may have had some), many high-speed line printers, several Teletype consoles, and, low and behold, many CRT consoles (a new thing then), but were VERY, VERY much larger than the 1401, taking up several rooms, each on its own floor of the building. As I walked through the rooms (nobody stopped me or even seemed to notice me), I noted that a large army of students was sitting at CRT consoles with large stacks of line-printer paper next to them. These stacks had pencil marks and paper clips and other things all over them, so that they looked like they had been chewed up by a faulty printer. I asked a student working on one of the stacks with his CRT what he was doing and why did those print-outs look like that. He stated that those printouts were of the operating system and utility programs for the new machines and those scribbles and paper clips, etc., were bugs (the first time I had heard that term) and the students were fixing the machines for use by all UCLA personnel and authorized students for whatever project they might need them for -- Engineering, Physics, and Mathematics were the main intended users. They were in effect creating the custom version of UNIX for these machines as part of their studies. I instantly realized why IBM had done such "charity" -- hell no, they wanted a dedicated (and I do mean DEDICATED!) army of programmers and computer engineers fixing and enhancing their machines that would work >FOR FREE
Everything I've read says that there were only two Model 95s produced, both for NASA. Maybe you saw a Model 91? Those weren't too popular either, so it's not too surprising that IBM didn't have a lot of custom software for them given they had so few customers to sell it to...
Absolutely spectacular advanced technology. Not just the day to day operational part of it, but to think of all the research, development and engineering behind it, is really mindblowing even by todays standards. Building it. Making it work. Having a business. Hiring skilled personnel. Maintenance. The industrial magnitude. Oh man. How fortunate that some of the equipment has survived and that you guys are still around to teach and inform the public.
After watching impressive videos such as this about absolutely archaic computer equipment? It makes me truly value the modern world a lot more. Computer engineers dreamed of today's technology. But it was George Jetson's/Buck Rogers technology. Many engineers of the 50's and 60's never lived long enough to see our modern computer world. I believe, if there was a nuclear war, with some high-altitude detonations that would create massive EMP's? We would literally be blown back to the bronze age and we'd have to start over. I do not take any of this for granted. I am extremely thankful to be able to flip a switch and get light. Or to turn on faucet and get water. Over 100 years ago none of this existed. Our society has been drastically altered in the last 40 years by computers alone. Massively. Now with the internet? We cannot even comprehend what is changing on a month to month basis with the free flow of information. Look at the process of adding in a few kilobytes (if that) of information into this IBM machine to do basic number crunching. Cards. Tapes. Print outs. All of this mechanical operation to enter data. If we lived in The Road (2009) or The Postman (1997) or Mad Max: The Road Warrior (1981)? All of this wonderful technology would be lost for centuries. Perhaps forever. Without organized civilization and the ability to work collectively with resources and math? This will fade into history and we'll never make it off of the planet to other stars and planets.
Well said. I feel that, given the current disrespect for science, we are possibly on the verge of 'devolving' into something more primitive once again. I have a suspicion Mankind's best days may be behind us. It is incredible to me that in a country such as America, which built amazing machines like this, and sent men to the Moon, powerful forces now wish to throw all that progress in the trash and instead teach 'Creationism' in schools.
I think what you are missing is the math behind the machines. even if the technology we have today was available in the 60's without the math to utilise it, it will come to waste. it is no so much about the computing power, but the math(or programs) we use. remember mathematicians run the algorithms(formulas) on paper for a long time. quantum mechanics and general relativity was done on paper. its the math that matter the most. infact talking about our modern world, true computing is in the verge of evaporating with a prolification of mathless computer science and function libraries. i hear there are script junkies who can hack NASA with little knowledge of programming.
Well put. Of 100 billion people who have existed in 200000 years of evolution, most didn't enjoy even this level of "old" technology. it's a good time to be alive
Virginia tech 1978 engineering. First computer class for all engineering students was FORTRAN using punch cards. Students would punch their own cards and give them to the instructor to run. You would get a printout at the next class and hope you had no errors!
@@edshandymantips4862 Illinois State University, Normal IL. Last PL/I introductory course course in Spring 1982 to use punch card. Walked through a door and handed to the operator and printouts on the desk. Could be 20-660 minute turn around.
WOW. Very impressive and informative. I don't know how much time, spares, knowledge and money it takes to bring these machines back to life, but thinking that there're only barely 60 years between a 1401 and a powerful mobile phone able to simulate several 1401 machines (including the equivalent of miles of punched cards) is truely amazing.
Many thanks Ken. This stuff is really fascinating. Its amazing just how much the technology has changed over the years. I can only imagine what it must have been like using these beasts in their day.
13:01 Core memories were assembled by carpet weavers in India because it was not possible to automate this process. This was due to the fact that each memory cell consists of a tiny little magnetic ring through which three wires were woven. I still have a 8 Kb core memory here at home and people just find it unbelievable.
During my college years I took Fortran classes that used an IBM System/3, somewhat newer than the 1401 but very much in the same configuration demoed here. There was a card reader, the computer and a printer. You punched your program at dedicated card punch stations onto these "new" 96-column cards, which were considerably smaller than the old 80-column cards, but just as much a hassle if you dropped them. To compile and run your program, you'd present your card deck to the operator, who would add control card(s) and put your little stack (Fortran programs are typically short, less than 50 cards) on the card reader, often in the middle of a much longer program that was being processed (kind of like an interrupt). When your cards were processed, the printer would spit out your results and you were on your way. It was a marvel of late 1960s technology!
When I was a child around 1975, I used such computers with memory cards, in the company my father worked in. The staff taught me how to use it. It was a large mining company in Poland. ;)
Wow, what a trip down memory lane. I joined IBM in 1970 and we were converting a lot of customers from 1401s to 360s. A 360 30 or 40 could run 1400 programs in an emulator mode. My first experience in a machine room was just a couple of weeks after I joined IBM. It was a 1401 to 360 conversion for a customer. I had taken typing in high school, which turned out to be a very useful skill when I had to use a keypunch.
Fascinating beyond reason! To think of how often data concerning me was processed through machines like these in the past is amazing. I wonder if any cards or tapes with my data on them still exist?!
turboslag the phone company used to send your bill on a punch card! You sent it back with your payment, a keypunch operator would punch on the same card, your payment info, then it was off to the comluter room for processing. I used to wet the middle of the bottom, top and left edge so it would jam the card reader!
@@rty1955 My business data processing teacher back in high school use to punch an extra hole in the amount field to change it from a debit to a credit. He got a stern letter from the phone company warning him not to do it again.
@@RaymondHng yeah if the amount was incorrect the programming would catch it, esp if it was a credit as a credit would never be put on a customers punch card. That was done in a different dept. I just made the 12 edge (top edge), left & right middle of the card and bottom middle of the card. This made it so the card would not pass thru the metal gappers in most card readers of the day, so the card reader would always jamb. This was my way of saying fu to the phone company :)
@@rty1955 Net neutrality, _United States v. AT&T_ , free long-distance calling over the Internet, and alternate local carriers are the best revenge. My clients and I have not paid Ma Bell a dime for over 20 years.
In late '68, just after getting out of the Army, I took a job with Kroger as a computer operator. There were two 360/50s and two 1410s and a 360/20. The 1410 systems each had six 729 tape drives. A year later I found a programmer trainee job with a department store in Cincinnati where I first learned 360 Assembler. Next I learned 1401 Autocoder as we still had many old 1401 programs that ran under CS30. There were 4 card sorters - two 083 and two 084 , 088 collator, 557 Interpreter, 519 reproducing punch with a mark-sense reader, and a 403 EAM. The computer printer was a 1404 printer that could handle either continuous forms or punch cards.
It’s amazing to me that any work got done back then. *So* many steps to do something so simple... And yet, as complicated as they were, these machines *still* saved time! Makes me wonder just how damn inefficient business must’ve been back then.
Business procedures were oriented around batch processing and snail mail; very seldom did anyone expect to get an immediate answer to a random question. Customer service just took down questions and mailed back answers in a few days. The one exception: airline reservations. The airlines used the biggest mainframes with the fastest CPU cycles, super fast disk drives (in large quantities!), and high speed phone line connections to CRT devices just to support the reservation agents. They made programmers write code according to very special rules so the transactions would run as quickly as possible. Not your 1401 system by any means!
Yet the punch card batch processing systems were amazingly fast and efficient compared to using clerical staff to prepare every invoice by hand and record every ledger entry, then still more clerks to verify the work and other clerks to prepare correspondence and reports from the records. It took armies of people many days to do what punch cards could do in hours (and modern equipment can do in minutes).
When I started my career in computers the 1401 was considered to be a very advanced machine. Google the UNIVAC SS80, it was a machine with DRUM storage for main memory and a unique memory architecture, called BIQUINARY. It was a genuine 2nd generation machine, not a dumb accounting machine, with internal modifiable memory programmed in a conventional manner. It had card readers, punches and 1/2 inch mag tape drives, the drum memory used a magnetic drum that revolved at 18,000 rpm. We programmed it in a very basic assembler language very little different from pure machine language, or a mixture of the two. There were only 3,200 words of memory, each word had 10 characters, each character had 4 bits with binary values of 1, 2, 4, and 5 YES FIVE not 8, hence the BIQUINARY name. in order to write an efficient program we had to keep track of where the drum was in relation to the R/W heads and time everything so that we did not waste drum revolutions waiting for the correct word to transferred to and from static registers. I worked for many years at Honeywell where I programmed the H 200 machines which were 1401 clones with many improvements, great machines that gave IBM a lot of heartaches. The H 200s competed very well with the early System/360 machines as well.
Similar drum memory was implemented on the IBM 650. The SOAP assembler (Symbolic Optimized Assembly Program) was developed to arrange the instructions on the drum to minimize access time. I also worked on both the IBM 1401 and Honeywell 200 series. Honeywell actually developed some pretty advanced (for the time) operating systems on the 200's.
Dave Daley Ah the LATE GREAT 1401 there was a time when somewhere around 75% of all installed computers were 1401s. The H200 was really a 1401 with some enhancements like the extra punctuation bit the ITEM MARK and some extra hardware instructions. We used to bury the 1401 and 1440s with the Honeywell tape drives which as you know were vacuum driven and had the ability to READ BACKWARDS. The H200 series did not really have an OS, there was a program loader which could be swapped for a DEBUG MONITOR which could DUMP memory when the RUN BUTTON stopped blinking. The Series 2000 did have a CRT display on the console and a form of limited OS, I had left Honeywell by the time the H2000 started rolling out Ah those piles of memory dumps covered with pencil marks and OCTAL TO DECIMAL calculations, no TI or HP CALCULATORS to do the calculation for you. I worked for HP from 79 to 84 on the HP 3000 what a fabulous machine that was with a REAL OPERATING SYSTEM, communications and a distributed DATA BASE SYSTEM that could be designed and implemented, literally in days. Those were the days when HP was an UNPARALLELED TECHNOLOGY COMPANY. Those were the days. Best wishes.
Sure the early 200's without storage protect didn't really have an operating system but the later systems did have OS200 and later OS2000. Both were pretty good for the time (60's and early '70"s). Even the humble model 2200 had MOD4 as an operating system, not as advanced as OSMVT on the 360's of the time but similar in design though the anemic 2200 had trouble with anything requiring a lot of CPU cycles. I never had any dealings with the HP systems but I did some work on the TANDEM line of machines which were their descendants.
Dave Daley OSMVT, I worked on 360/50 and 65 for about a year and a half. OS MVT, MVT2, ISAM, 2311, 2314. Good heavens how it all comes back, mountains of cards and JCL, oh! and generation data sets program constantly crashing with DATA EXCEPTIONS. No the HP 3000 was the best, HP was such a fabulous company to work for in those days, company cars, profit sharing and stock options. WOW, what happened, I switched over to Bridge Communications, 3Com and Cisco, that’s what happened.
I love this program. My brain is so used to the restrictions of fixed point integer maths growing up used to microprocessors it never struck that it would be perfectly ordinary for a computer to be able to add up powers of 2 without end and never break or lose precision until you wanted it to stop. It's so cute I love it :D
When I started out in data processing in 1968 we had the 1403 printer and yes it was loud. When you got used to how the printer sounded when printing you could sometimes detect when there was a problem with the printout just by the change in sound quality. This ability was especially important when printing payroll or in my case city tax bills. The tax bill was a large document approximately 14x22 inches in size. At that size you didn't want to ruin many since the computer room manager would only order a couple of cases more then you really needed. Those were the days!
I can't believe that I watched such an awesome video, exceptionally valuable to anyone who is interested to know about history or know-how of computers.
great videos. this equipment was the workhorse of businesses. sold a lot of business forms to the end users, and that business changed just like the equipment you show here changed to pc servers. an amazing time.
Good times, I worked with these machines from 1978 to 1998. 360/40 systems; 370/145/148 and 158. Card readers and punches; tape drives, models 2420 and 3420; disc, 3330; 3340 and 3350 and printers, models 1403 and 3211. Fábio Kandrik - Rio de Janeiro - Brazil.
Two observations: 1) Aging, having had your best years behind you and being replaced is so sad, for both machines and people alike! Glad these guys are spending their time continuing to do useful work! 2) The processing power of thousands of Cray supercomputers in our iPhones and most of what we do is TikTok, Facebook, and/or distribute/read fake news! How sad!!
These computers were on TV shows like lost in space,voyage to the bottom of the sea,six million dollar man,bionic woman time tunnel etc.but some different one.I do like the old electronics.and vacuum tubes too.
my first computer that i was repair as IBM CE in Africa ( Angola ) very old and good memories thanks for this film to remenber that.
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A very interesting walk down memory lane. What's interesting is that the concepts of computing are still exactly the same, just miniaturized and sped up by a factor of one million or so. As slow and archaic as these systems seem from our point of view today, they were still much much faster and more sophisticated than methods used in business administration decades before. It's a tribute to the quality of design, componentry, and workmanship that these very old machines are still capability of performing the tasks they were originally designed for. They are a typical representation of the "built in America" quality of this great era, a quality that has been sadly lost in this day of shoddy imports.
These are like the wizards of computing..guardians of the ancient technology that One day John Titor would have to time travel back in time to retrieve for a future where noone knows how to program anymore...only a small elite would know how to change programs and access the reality simualtors we will all be trapped in in the future
IBM stuff is well covered. if anything I'm guessing what they have to timetravel back for is some ex-soviet computer that nobody knows who even built it
At Mutual of Omaha we used to put our blank 5081s (cards) on tape and then when we needed them we'd punch them back off the tape on the 1402 card punch. Saved a lot of storage space by not having to stockpile so many blank cards. :-)
Everyone with a smartphone or a computer watching TH-cam should have to watch this first before watching anything else, this and ColdFusion greatest story ever told historical computing videos, so that everyone can be grateful for the amazing possibilities we have now to share read record and access all the worlds information in a blink of an eye...
@@slightlyevolved You are right - too lazy to find the video, but there were two motors, one for each direction, and four clutches. Each belt went over 3 pulleys. There must have been a brake as well ?
I find it interesting that one of the guys said he worked for Federals department store in Michigan. When I was a kid there was one about a mile from my house.
Federal Department Stores is now Macys, Inc. Macy's Parent Company. I really need to take a trip to go see this computer sometime in the near future. I find it fascinating.
Thank for your comments, and we'd be thrilled to have you visit. Just to set the record straight, my summer job was at Federal's department stores (a small chain in Michigan). Federated Department stores is huge and, I believe, is the owner of Macy's.
Paul learned Fortran.... ... ... and then spent his entire career writing Cobol???????? ;) This is great... I've seen loads of Curious Marc's more informal videos of your 1401... it's nice to see a more formal presentation too.
I entered the Army in 1974, was school trained on the IBM 360. My duty station in Worms, Germany had a 1401. Card sorters and 053 Collator. Card jams were a bitch. Had to flatten the mangled cards and re-punch each one on the 029 card punch. Lot of memories. Also worked on the 370 and 4341 computer systems.
What I would like to come into being would be a multi-Media virtual IBM 1401 simulator in sight and sound. Some of sounds would include that of the combination unit record peripheral sounds, the clicking of the sense switches, the actions of the tape drives, and operator actions with the mouse such as dragging and dropping actions to empty the chips bucked of the 1402 card read punch, and so on.
I haven't gone through all the comments yet, but I'm glad that so far I haven't seen some kind of moronic luddite saying some overly nostalgic garbage like, "Wow, what a great moment to see this; here is a REAL computer, built from back in my grandparents' generation when people put 'real talent and pride' into their work and built things 'right'!"
I worked at IBM in 1970 as a customer engineer. Once I was called out to fix an 029 card punch machine with a very sticky keyboard. Turns out the punchroom supervisor had spilled his brandy and coke all over it. Got chatting to the very nice young operator. After that fateful day I was called out there regularly. That only stopped when I married that nice operator. We are in our seventies now and still talk about those good old days.
Like Grumpier Old Men they pretend to be all kind but you can tell they bump heads on who's smarter it's the two who talk over each other and argue but been best friends for 50 years
Where are they getting replacement Semiconductors for these things? From what I have read the 1401 used special transistors designed by IBM, and probably custom manufactured for them. It doesn't seem like the kind of thing you could buy off the shelf these days. That is unless someone found a cache of NOS ones in the back of an old IBM warehouse or something.
Richard Wielgosz the Soviets made illegal copies of almost all the Western tubes...In the 1990's, you could order any tube you needed for anything from Russia!
6:00 maintains the sort. I love it. 6:34 “I was” These guys are good. I can just tell. You could drop these guys right back into the field from retirement and they would kick ass
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The great thing about the IBM 1403 was you could tell which report was printing, or even a core dump, just from the sound. If you were running a job and the job cancelled, you could tell almost immediately because of the distinctive sound the dump makes. Plus, when the printer runs out of paper or forms, the hood would open. That way if you were working all night printing forms for like, a bank's end of year statements, you could load the forms, start the printer, lower the hood, and lean your office chair back and lay your head against the printer to get 10-15 minutes of shut-eye in between boxes of forms. When the box emptied, the hood would open and wake you up and you could load the next box of forms and continue the print.
The IBM 1403, the model 26 keypunch, and the 2501 card reader/punch were common when I was a computer operator between 1973 and 1977 when I became a computer programmer.
I used a lot of that equipment at the Navy Supply Depot, Yokosuka Japan, 1978-81. Our division Chief had basically a death threat on us for all the times someone left a coffee cup on the printer hood, which would then tip over when the hood opened. You never saw so many guys running and diving so fast to grab that cup before it tipped.
"Paper or forms"? What are the forms made of, then, if not paper?
@@HelloKittyFanMan. One example: Aboard ship in the Navy we printed paychecks using a payroll program that applied the name and pay due to a pre-made form, connected like paper, which could be fitted onto the printer by adjusting for the width.
@@HelloKittyFanMan. _Paper_ means blank paper stock. _Forms_ means pre-printed forms on paper with sprocket holes.
Wow, @@deraldporter3828, almost a year ago stupid TH-cam never notified me of your reply here!
"Connected like paper"? Were the forms made of fabric? I really doubt it.
Such a blast from the past! My Navy outfit had 2 1401's in 1962. We used "Autocoder" programing language. My whole outfit were complete geeks. Thanks for the memories.
Autocoder was just like any other assembler (SSPS was other popular option), so not really a proper programming language but a symbolic assembler.. Autocoder was kinda advanced as for such simple machine, quite close to modern assemblers, It could even use custom libraries for various stuff. I was running both SSPS and Autocoder on emulator. Too bad I can't afford to go there and run some program on real 1401...
I started working at IBM in 1964 and worked on dozens of 1401 systems. I never imagined seeing my old work place represented in a museum! I joined the Computer History Museum and attended numerous events, and halped with the Memorex at 50 celebration. A great place to visit if you ever worked around computers.
I could still change a box of paper with my eyes closed.change print chain, and punch prepare a new carriage control tape...
I was 18 years old when I ran all this equipment... wow.. funny to look back.
What a *gorgeous* machine. I’m grateful to have joined computing in the early 80s during the home computer boom, but how I wish I could have experienced the big iron era. If I lived in Mountain View, I’d buy the old timers dinner every week and just let them talk about these monsters. Thanks for sharing, Ken!
Nio ju
"In the sixties women did all the keypunching." Except in the military. I had the misfortune of being a customer engineer on an army base and the soldiers (male) beat the hell out of the mechanical keyboards. In accounts where the keypunch operators were exclusively women the keyboards never gave any trouble.
Women are really special and heavenly beings.
@@renatoamaral8259 So are men. All humans have the potential to be special and heavenly beings.
I got my start in computers in 1968 when I was 12 years old. My dad was a Statistician for Southwestern Bell in St Louis. He let me program the 1401 computer in the Business Research Division on weekends. I learned Fortran II and Autocoder, which was a macro assembler. Later in 1975 I attended Control Data Institute, where we worked on an old CDC 3300 Supercomputer. Later I became a Field Engineer for Tandem Computers, and then a contract programmer for the next 20 years. Amazing to see where computers have come from then.
I learned computers in 1977, in the Navy. We had a class on the unit record equipment, and we actually did program those wire boards a few times. On the sorter, the instructor told a good story where he had a big deck of cards, all different colors, and that the sorter could sort by color. Of course, each colored card had 1 column punched with a different value for different colors, and BOOM - all the blue cards came out in the same slot, etc...Great times.
What a cool demo!. I spent several years programming the 1401 and its big brother the 1410 (which had I/O channels that could generate interrupts). One footnote to the 1401 demo -- IBM had a program called the "1401 report program generator" that facilitated the conversion of the wired control panel "programs" for punch-card accounting machines shown in the demo to 1401 programs. You described the inputs, outputs, totals, subtotals, etc. and it generated the 1401 program automatically.
Another footnote -- there was a machine that looked like a keypunch called a "verifier." After a program or some data was keypunched, the deck was was fed into a verifier, and the operator rekeyed it. The verifier caught discrepancies between the punched cards and the rekeying. Verifying doubled data entry time, but saved computer time which was valuable in those days. It was also kind of a status symbol if you were important enough to have your programs verified :-).
Great Demo. Brought back memories of when I used to operate a 1401 back in 1969 - 1970 when I was working for IBM. The one item that the commentators failed to mention was how long it took to run an application. For example, to process an AIC (Automatic Inventory Control) report for an automotive dealership it would take 6 to 10 hours, depending on the size of the dealership. Furthermore, if there was a tape drive read error at a critical point in the run, you had to go back to the previous month's input tape, re-run that entire job to create a new tape, and start the current month all over again.
That's why it was essential to program processing checkpoints into the application. You restart at the checkpoint instead of the very beginning.
First computer I worked on in 1965 at Ford Motor Company at Halewood plant in Liverpool England. I finished working in November 2019 still in IT at the NAB (bank) in Melbourne Australia.
In my early career the 1401 was our input/output device. We used it to load punched cards to tape and print output stored on tape. Main computer was an IBM 7080.
BTW, it was a Navy installation and we had a card deck for the 1401 that would drive the print head of the 1403 at various speeds so that we could get it to play “Anchors Away” when the Brass visited.
Great presentation! Awesome to see the real thing! This show had everything i tells ya! A little tech, a little mechanic, a little electronics, and a little sexism! Boy, the 1960’s had it all.
A close friend of my fathers used to work for a bank (I can't think of the name) back in the mid 60s, he used the IBM 360s to write a program to keep records of sales etc for Shell gasoline. Usually something would go wrong once ever one or two weeks and he'd get a call in the middle of the night to take the next flight out their and fix whatever the problem was and then fly back home sometimes the next day. The funniest part was how he talked about the computer room being about the size of a few offices when he was hired and by the time his contract ended the whole office floor was the computer room and about 1/4 to 1/2 of it was the giant cooling system they had to use to keep the machines running.
yèàh 360 370 big dèàl in University IBM had graduates used to equip
so good for sales - they never mention idiot operator errors - they happened çàlgàry
r m errors like: turning off the cooling stuff!
Wonderful walk down memory lane. First class I had on computer programming was on a 1401. Worked with all this equipment in my career.
My first experience was system 34 and later AS 400. But this is very primitive but exciting.
As someone who worked in an IBM 604/420/077/080/520?/026 setup, followed by 609/421 etc, then ICT 1900 series I was in awe of the 1400 and 360 series. From a plugboard grafter!
Wish u made more content like this it’s super interesting and could possibly help kids understand technology better, breaking down old computers helps to understand wtf a computer does nowadays, we just shrunk them down
The 1401 was the first computer I learned to program. Watching this video takes me back to the '70s when they were being phased out by my company for system 360. The 1401 used decimal addresses for its storage; the 360 used binary, and addresses were expressed in hexadecimal. They still are and modern computers still use this mathematical base.
One day i will go to US. During this travel, I will visit this amazing museum. So great stuff ! thks. I love your video.
All these old machines bring back memories. I worked on an IBM 370 and 4341 with punch cards and printers like that. The 4341 I used 3270 terminals with Cobol and CICS to send the info to the correct terminal.
Brent Wheeler i was a systems programmer for 360, 370, and 4300 models
Same here.
I was starting my 5.67 years as a Physic/Mathematics Dual Major in Fall 1966 at UCLA (I could take the bus right from there to a few blocks from my and my parent's home; very convenient, since I did not have a car until later). As I explored my new school, I went to the rear of the new Student Union building, which looked south down a hill to the two huge Mathematics and Engineering buildings. I noticed a lot of work was being done on a new glass-sided multi-story building bridging between the two older buildings. This went on for several weeks and then I saw that the building was full of students and I walked over to it and asked what they were doing there. The new building had two (not one, but TWO!) huge IBM 360 MODEL 95 "super" (for the era) computers that it turned out that IBM had sold UCLA for a rock-bottom price. Each one looked a little like the IBM 1401 in style, with huge dark blue cabinets, many large reel-to-reel tape drives (I did not see any card reader/writers, but they may have had some), many high-speed line printers, several Teletype consoles, and, low and behold, many CRT consoles (a new thing then), but were VERY, VERY much larger than the 1401, taking up several rooms, each on its own floor of the building. As I walked through the rooms (nobody stopped me or even seemed to notice me), I noted that a large army of students was sitting at CRT consoles with large stacks of line-printer paper next to them. These stacks had pencil marks and paper clips and other things all over them, so that they looked like they had been chewed up by a faulty printer. I asked a student working on one of the stacks with his CRT what he was doing and why did those print-outs look like that. He stated that those printouts were of the operating system and utility programs for the new machines and those scribbles and paper clips, etc., were bugs (the first time I had heard that term) and the students were fixing the machines for use by all UCLA personnel and authorized students for whatever project they might need them for -- Engineering, Physics, and Mathematics were the main intended users. They were in effect creating the custom version of UNIX for these machines as part of their studies. I instantly realized why IBM had done such "charity" -- hell no, they wanted a dedicated (and I do mean DEDICATED!) army of programmers and computer engineers fixing and enhancing their machines that would work >FOR FREE
That's one way to get around child labor laws.
Everything I've read says that there were only two Model 95s produced, both for NASA. Maybe you saw a Model 91? Those weren't too popular either, so it's not too surprising that IBM didn't have a lot of custom software for them given they had so few customers to sell it to...
When I went to college in L.A. in 1967 we had an IBM 1420. The output of it was an IBM Selectric typewriter.
Absolutely spectacular advanced technology. Not just the day to day operational part of it, but to think of all the research, development and engineering behind it, is really mindblowing even by todays standards. Building it. Making it work. Having a business. Hiring skilled personnel. Maintenance. The industrial magnitude. Oh man.
How fortunate that some of the equipment has survived and that you guys are still around to teach and inform the public.
After watching impressive videos such as this about absolutely archaic computer equipment? It makes me truly value the modern world a lot more. Computer engineers dreamed of today's technology. But it was George Jetson's/Buck Rogers technology. Many engineers of the 50's and 60's never lived long enough to see our modern computer world. I believe, if there was a nuclear war, with some high-altitude detonations that would create massive EMP's? We would literally be blown back to the bronze age and we'd have to start over. I do not take any of this for granted. I am extremely thankful to be able to flip a switch and get light. Or to turn on faucet and get water. Over 100 years ago none of this existed. Our society has been drastically altered in the last 40 years by computers alone. Massively. Now with the internet? We cannot even comprehend what is changing on a month to month basis with the free flow of information. Look at the process of adding in a few kilobytes (if that) of information into this IBM machine to do basic number crunching. Cards. Tapes. Print outs. All of this mechanical operation to enter data. If we lived in The Road (2009) or The Postman (1997) or Mad Max: The Road Warrior (1981)? All of this wonderful technology would be lost for centuries. Perhaps forever. Without organized civilization and the ability to work collectively with resources and math? This will fade into history and we'll never make it off of the planet to other stars and planets.
Well said. I feel that, given the current disrespect for science, we are possibly on the verge of 'devolving' into something more primitive once again. I have a suspicion Mankind's best days may be behind us. It is incredible to me that in a country such as America, which built amazing machines like this, and sent men to the Moon, powerful forces now wish to throw all that progress in the trash and instead teach 'Creationism' in schools.
I think what you are missing is the math behind the machines. even if the technology we have today was available in the 60's without the math to utilise it, it will come to waste. it is no so much about the computing power, but the math(or programs) we use. remember mathematicians run the algorithms(formulas) on paper for a long time. quantum mechanics and general relativity was done on paper. its the math that matter the most. infact talking about our modern world, true computing is in the verge of evaporating with a prolification of mathless computer science and function libraries. i hear there are script junkies who can hack NASA with little knowledge of programming.
Well put. Of 100 billion people who have existed in 200000 years of evolution, most didn't enjoy even this level of "old" technology. it's a good time to be alive
Very very interesting.
A good touristic visit at the museum of computer. I would like to visit it in person.
I started college at ISU, Normal, IL, USA in 1981-2. First two computer classes still used punched cards.
Virginia tech 1978 engineering. First computer class for all engineering students was FORTRAN using punch cards. Students would punch their own cards and give them to the instructor to run. You would get a printout at the next class and hope you had no errors!
@@edshandymantips4862 Illinois State University, Normal IL. Last PL/I introductory course course in Spring 1982 to use punch card. Walked through a door and handed to the operator and printouts on the desk. Could be 20-660 minute turn around.
WOW. Very impressive and informative. I don't know how much time, spares, knowledge and money it takes to bring these machines back to life, but thinking that there're only barely 60 years between a 1401 and a powerful mobile phone able to simulate several 1401 machines (including the equivalent of miles of punched cards) is truely amazing.
My first official computer class was Fall 1987. We had 5.5" x 8" floppy discs with green screen and basic programming.
Many thanks Ken. This stuff is really fascinating. Its amazing just how much the technology has changed over the years. I can only imagine what it must have been like using these beasts in their day.
13:01 Core memories were assembled by carpet weavers in India because it was not possible to automate this process. This was due to the fact that each memory cell consists of a tiny little magnetic ring through which three wires were woven. I still have a 8 Kb core memory here at home and people just find it unbelievable.
I thought there were 4 wires? X, Y, sense, and inhibit.
@@curtisrawson2548 you could put the sense and inhibit as the same wire with a bit of extra circuitry
There is a video on youtube showing the automated process to make core memory with wires and magnetic ring.
During my college years I took Fortran classes that used an IBM System/3, somewhat newer than the 1401 but very much in the same configuration demoed here. There was a card reader, the computer and a printer. You punched your program at dedicated card punch stations onto these "new" 96-column cards, which were considerably smaller than the old 80-column cards, but just as much a hassle if you dropped them. To compile and run your program, you'd present your card deck to the operator, who would add control card(s) and put your little stack (Fortran programs are typically short, less than 50 cards) on the card reader, often in the middle of a much longer program that was being processed (kind of like an interrupt). When your cards were processed, the printer would spit out your results and you were on your way. It was a marvel of late 1960s technology!
When I was a child around 1975, I used such computers with memory cards, in the company my father worked in. The staff taught me how to use it. It was a large mining company in Poland. ;)
Wow, what a trip down memory lane. I joined IBM in 1970 and we were converting a lot of customers from 1401s to 360s. A 360 30 or 40 could run 1400 programs in an emulator mode. My first experience in a machine room was just a couple of weeks after I joined IBM. It was a 1401 to 360 conversion for a customer. I had taken typing in high school, which turned out to be a very useful skill when I had to use a keypunch.
Nice
Fascinating beyond reason! To think of how often data concerning me was processed through machines like these in the past is amazing. I wonder if any cards or tapes with my data on them still exist?!
turboslag the phone company used to send your bill on a punch card! You sent it back with your payment, a keypunch operator would punch on the same card, your payment info, then it was off to the comluter room for processing. I used to wet the middle of the bottom, top and left edge so it would jam the card reader!
vèry likèly i still have blank cards
làffinn çàl
@@rty1955 My business data processing teacher back in high school use to punch an extra hole in the amount field to change it from a debit to a credit. He got a stern letter from the phone company warning him not to do it again.
@@RaymondHng yeah if the amount was incorrect the programming would catch it, esp if it was a credit as a credit would never be put on a customers punch card. That was done in a different dept. I just made the 12 edge (top edge), left & right middle of the card and bottom middle of the card. This made it so the card would not pass thru the metal gappers in most card readers of the day, so the card reader would always jamb. This was my way of saying fu to the phone company :)
@@rty1955 Net neutrality, _United States v. AT&T_ , free long-distance calling over the Internet, and alternate local carriers are the best revenge. My clients and I have not paid Ma Bell a dime for over 20 years.
In late '68, just after getting out of the Army, I took a job with Kroger as a computer operator. There were two 360/50s and two 1410s and a 360/20. The 1410 systems each had six 729 tape drives.
A year later I found a programmer trainee job with a department store in Cincinnati where I first learned 360 Assembler. Next I learned 1401 Autocoder as we still had many old 1401 programs that ran under CS30. There were 4 card sorters - two 083 and two 084 , 088 collator, 557 Interpreter, 519 reproducing punch with a mark-sense reader, and a 403 EAM.
The computer printer was a 1404 printer that could handle either continuous forms or punch cards.
It’s amazing to me that any work got done back then. *So* many steps to do something so simple... And yet, as complicated as they were, these machines *still* saved time! Makes me wonder just how damn inefficient business must’ve been back then.
Business procedures were oriented around batch processing and snail mail; very seldom did anyone expect to get an immediate answer to a random question. Customer service just took down questions and mailed back answers in a few days. The one exception: airline reservations.
The airlines used the biggest mainframes with the fastest CPU cycles, super fast disk drives (in large quantities!), and high speed phone line connections to CRT devices just to support the reservation agents. They made programmers write code according to very special rules so the transactions would run as quickly as possible. Not your 1401 system by any means!
Yet the punch card batch processing systems were amazingly fast and efficient compared to using clerical staff to prepare every invoice by hand and record every ledger entry, then still more clerks to verify the work and other clerks to prepare correspondence and reports from the records.
It took armies of people many days to do what punch cards could do in hours (and modern equipment can do in minutes).
This was how it was done before computers. th-cam.com/video/kkUlOcXzszk/w-d-xo.html
When I started my career in computers the 1401 was considered to be a very advanced machine.
Google the UNIVAC SS80, it was a machine with DRUM storage for main memory and a unique memory architecture, called BIQUINARY.
It was a genuine 2nd generation machine, not a dumb accounting machine, with internal modifiable memory programmed in a conventional manner.
It had card readers, punches and 1/2 inch mag tape drives, the drum memory used a magnetic drum that revolved at 18,000 rpm.
We programmed it in a very basic assembler language very little different from pure machine language, or a mixture of the two.
There were only 3,200 words of memory, each word had 10 characters, each character had 4 bits with binary values of 1, 2, 4, and 5 YES FIVE not 8, hence the BIQUINARY name.
in order to write an efficient program we had to keep track of where the drum was in relation to the R/W heads and time everything so that we did not waste drum revolutions waiting for the correct word to transferred to and from static registers.
I worked for many years at Honeywell where I programmed the H 200 machines which were 1401 clones with many improvements, great machines that gave IBM a lot of heartaches. The H 200s competed very well with the early System/360 machines as well.
Similar drum memory was implemented on the IBM 650. The SOAP assembler (Symbolic Optimized Assembly Program) was developed to arrange the instructions on the drum to minimize access time. I also worked on both the IBM 1401 and Honeywell 200 series. Honeywell actually developed some pretty advanced (for the time) operating systems on the 200's.
Dave Daley Ah the LATE GREAT 1401 there was a time when somewhere around 75% of all installed computers were 1401s.
The H200 was really a 1401 with some enhancements like the extra punctuation bit the ITEM MARK and some extra hardware instructions.
We used to bury the 1401 and 1440s with the Honeywell tape drives which as you know were vacuum driven and had the ability to READ BACKWARDS.
The H200 series did not really have an OS, there was a program loader which could be swapped for a DEBUG MONITOR which could DUMP memory when the RUN BUTTON stopped blinking. The Series 2000 did have a CRT display on the console and a form of limited OS, I had left Honeywell by the time the H2000 started rolling out
Ah those piles of memory dumps covered with pencil marks and OCTAL TO DECIMAL calculations, no TI or HP CALCULATORS to do the calculation for you.
I worked for HP from 79 to 84 on the HP 3000 what a fabulous machine that was with a REAL OPERATING SYSTEM, communications and a distributed DATA BASE SYSTEM that could be designed and implemented, literally in days.
Those were the days when HP was an UNPARALLELED TECHNOLOGY COMPANY.
Those were the days.
Best wishes.
Sure the early 200's without storage protect didn't really have an operating system but the later systems did have OS200 and later OS2000. Both were pretty good for the time (60's and early '70"s). Even the humble model 2200 had MOD4 as an operating system, not as advanced as OSMVT on the 360's of the time but similar in design though the anemic 2200 had trouble with anything requiring a lot of CPU cycles. I never had any dealings with the HP systems but I did some work on the TANDEM line of machines which were their descendants.
Dave Daley OSMVT, I worked on 360/50 and 65 for about a year and a half. OS MVT, MVT2, ISAM, 2311, 2314. Good heavens how it all comes back, mountains of cards and JCL, oh! and generation data sets program constantly crashing with DATA EXCEPTIONS.
No the HP 3000 was the best, HP was such a fabulous company to work for in those days, company cars, profit sharing and stock options.
WOW, what happened, I switched over to Bridge Communications, 3Com and Cisco, that’s what happened.
I loved watching this demonstration. :-) Thankyou Ken and Paul
I love this program. My brain is so used to the restrictions of fixed point integer maths growing up used to microprocessors it never struck that it would be perfectly ordinary for a computer to be able to add up powers of 2 without end and never break or lose precision until you wanted it to stop. It's so cute I love it :D
When I started out in data processing in 1968 we had the 1403 printer and yes it was loud. When you got used to how the printer sounded when printing you could sometimes detect when there was a problem with the printout just by the change in sound quality. This ability was especially important when printing payroll or in my case city tax bills. The tax bill was a large document approximately 14x22 inches in size. At that size you didn't want to ruin many since the computer room manager would only order a couple of cases more then you really needed. Those were the days!
Wow this was a great overview! I need to visit this museum.
I love this machine and this crew! They are my heroes.
I can't believe that I watched such an awesome video, exceptionally valuable to anyone who is interested to know about history or know-how of computers.
Great presentation by beyond fantastic presenters love the respect for each other
great videos. this equipment was the workhorse of businesses. sold a lot of business forms to the end users, and that business changed just like the equipment you show here changed to pc servers. an amazing time.
LOL, "workhorse"? It can barely do anything as compared to what today's computers can do!
Wish that I could visit this place! AMAZING!
Good times, I worked with these machines from 1978 to 1998. 360/40 systems; 370/145/148 and 158. Card readers and punches; tape drives, models 2420 and 3420; disc, 3330; 3340 and 3350 and printers, models 1403 and 3211. Fábio Kandrik - Rio de Janeiro - Brazil.
Who the hell is disliking such a great presentation??
Satanas, el Diablo, Legion y Baalzebub.
Maybe because the sound cuts out at the end, whilst he was still speaking ...
This is the most informative and interesting video I've seen for ages! 🙂🙂
Two observations:
1) Aging, having had your best years behind you and being replaced is so sad, for both machines and people alike! Glad these guys are spending their time continuing to do useful work!
2) The processing power of thousands of Cray supercomputers in our iPhones and most of what we do is TikTok, Facebook, and/or distribute/read fake news! How sad!!
These computers were on TV shows like lost in space,voyage to the bottom of the sea,six million dollar man,bionic woman time tunnel etc.but some different one.I do like the old electronics.and vacuum tubes too.
Albert: "electronics and vacuum tubes"? Um... vacuum tubes _ARE_ electronics!
I've seen old TV shows/films where they just used an IBM card sorter and called that a "computer".
My mom operated one of those key punch machines back in the sixties.
& i, prob, 'know' hèr 2 35 keypunch 'girls' busy doing payroll billing cards
làffinn dàmn i àm oldè çàl
Or the '60s. (Less effort to type, ya know....)
my first computer that i was repair as IBM CE in Africa ( Angola ) very old and good memories thanks for this film to remenber that.
A very interesting walk down memory lane. What's interesting is that the concepts of computing are still exactly the same, just miniaturized and sped up by a factor of one million or so. As slow and archaic as these systems seem from our point of view today, they were still much much faster and more sophisticated than methods used in business administration decades before.
It's a tribute to the quality of design, componentry, and workmanship that these very old machines are still capability of performing the tasks they were originally designed for. They are a typical representation of the "built in America" quality of this great era, a quality that has been sadly lost in this day of shoddy imports.
Thanks for an interesting and technically excellent lesson.
These are like the wizards of computing..guardians of the ancient technology that One day John Titor would have to time travel back in time to retrieve for a future where noone knows how to program anymore...only a small elite would know how to change programs and access the reality simualtors we will all be trapped in in the future
IBM stuff is well covered. if anything I'm guessing what they have to timetravel back for is some ex-soviet computer that nobody knows who even built it
Dude, ASM isn't that hard
At Mutual of Omaha we used to put our blank 5081s (cards) on tape and then when we needed them we'd punch them back off the tape on the 1402 card punch. Saved a lot of storage space by not having to stockpile so many blank cards. :-)
Why would you still need the cards if their data was already on tape, though?
@@TahreyUK I think this is a joke, like photocopying a blank sheet instead of buying more paper :-)
Everyone with a smartphone or a computer watching TH-cam should have to watch this first before watching anything else, this and ColdFusion greatest story ever told historical computing videos, so that everyone can be grateful for the amazing possibilities we have now to share read record and access all the worlds information in a blink of an eye...
Um, no, they shouldn't have to. Also, where did you get the idea that a generic term such as cold fusion should be treated like a brand, "ColdFusion"?
The IBM 370 was the “king” back in my days in college!
These guys are absolute legends!
I like the video and camera work as well. Great all around
I am probably genetically related to this machine.
If you want one, ask CuriousMarc
Very interesting thanks. Must visit
These fellas flat out dedicated their whole lives so we can have smartphone 4K cameras and simultaneous rocket booster landings.
Not their whole lives. Obviously not while they were kids.
Thank you so much for posting this! A fantastic demonstration
I always wondered why the tapes would make those jerky motions!
@@slightlyevolved You are right - too lazy to find the video, but there were two motors, one for each direction, and four clutches. Each belt went over 3 pulleys. There must have been a brake as well ?
Funny getting a power black out during high speed rewind! Been there, done that!
Betsy Miao, volunteer IBM 026 keypunch operator
amazing. how far we have come since those days
I find it interesting that one of the guys said he worked for Federals department store in Michigan. When I was a kid there was one about a mile from my house.
Amazing. Hardly anyone has heard of that small (and now defunct) chain
Federal Department Stores is now Macys, Inc. Macy's Parent Company. I really need to take a trip to go see this computer sometime in the near future. I find it fascinating.
Thank for your comments, and we'd be thrilled to have you visit. Just to set the record straight, my summer job was at Federal's department stores (a small chain in Michigan). Federated Department stores is huge and, I believe, is the owner of Macy's.
Paul learned Fortran.... ... ... and then spent his entire career writing Cobol???????? ;)
This is great... I've seen loads of Curious Marc's more informal videos of your 1401... it's nice to see a more formal presentation too.
I entered the Army in 1974, was school trained on the IBM 360. My duty station in Worms, Germany had a 1401. Card sorters and 053 Collator. Card jams were a bitch. Had to flatten the mangled cards and re-punch each one on the 029 card punch. Lot of memories. Also worked on the 370 and 4341 computer systems.
My father-in-law worked on a 1401.
Buddy Cox I worked on a 1401 thr. 360s. I also worked on 407s before the 1401
What I would like to come into being would be a multi-Media virtual IBM 1401 simulator in sight and sound. Some of sounds would include that of the combination unit record peripheral sounds, the clicking of the sense switches, the actions of the tape drives, and operator actions with the mouse such as dragging and dropping actions to empty the chips bucked of the 1402 card read punch, and so on.
Maybe a VR sim?
Virtual keypunch machine www.masswerk.at/keypunch
so much pioneering here
Muchas felicidades a los expositores ❤
I must visit this place. Love this vid. Thanks
I wonder if that's were the tweet length actually came from. Very cool!
Yes in those days you worked with it. A computer operator was a good job and an entry to programming or management
I wanna go to this museum but I'm too poor to travel there from Tennessee ;-;
14:31 - there's nothing like a sneering cackle when interfacing with the public.
I haven't gone through all the comments yet, but I'm glad that so far I haven't seen some kind of moronic luddite saying some overly nostalgic garbage like, "Wow, what a great moment to see this; here is a REAL computer, built from back in my grandparents' generation when people put 'real talent and pride' into their work and built things 'right'!"
so awesome thanks!
fine machine
...for back then.
I worked at IBM in 1970 as a customer engineer. Once I was called out to fix an 029 card punch machine with a very sticky keyboard. Turns out the punchroom supervisor had spilled his brandy and coke all over it. Got chatting to the very nice young operator. After that fateful day I was called out there regularly. That only stopped when I married that nice operator. We are in our seventies now and still talk about those good old days.
Sounds like computers were very useful in your case!!!
@@irgski Yup! I got really lucky there.
These Two Guys Awesome...
Thanks Ken. That was damn enjoyable.
That was very interesting - Thank you!
Mountain View California? I live like 10 min away, San Jose.
Get down there then!
I wish I could attend a demo like this, however I can't really afford a trip to Mountain View.
16:40 $0.80 per hour in 1960 would be $7.04 per hour today.
Like Grumpier Old Men they pretend to be all kind but you can tell they bump heads on who's smarter it's the two who talk over each other and argue but been best friends for 50 years
Where are they getting replacement Semiconductors for these things? From what I have read the 1401 used special transistors designed by IBM, and probably custom manufactured for them. It doesn't seem like the kind of thing you could buy off the shelf these days. That is unless someone found a cache of NOS ones in the back of an old IBM warehouse or something.
Richard Wielgosz the Soviets made illegal copies of almost all the Western tubes...In the 1990's, you could order any tube you needed for anything from Russia!
Rick, when did you start believing that "[s]emiconductor" was some sort of brand?
@@brentboswell1294 this is transistorised no tubes and they have replaced them with bog standard germanium transistors
6:00 maintains the sort. I love it.
6:34 “I was”
These guys are good. I can just tell. You could drop these guys right back into the field from retirement and they would kick ass
Thanks for your video :) , I'm passionate about retro computing , it's possible to buy a punched card ? Kind regards
Of course. Ebay.
Yeah, I saw fortran being sold on eBay
Uhg, I wanna print my name on a card.
@MichaelKingsfordGray why is this needed? It’s just being rude. People can have a username if they want.
En 1969 inicié como operador de la 1401, soy muy afortunado!
Mmmmmm.... I can smell the warm sewing-machine oil from here :-)
6:26 coders: should I raise my hand now or wait for the linter to fix his syntax ?
I used to work with this technology. The 1403 was a great printer, however, our computer engineer absolutely hated working on it.