The IBM 1401 compiles and runs FORTRAN II
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 มิ.ย. 2024
- We attempt to compile and run a simple FORTRAN program on our vintage 1959 IBM mainframe computer at the Computer History Museum. FORTRAN is a big stretch for this business oriented machine, with 16k memory and a CPU not meant at all for scientific applications. Even integer multiply and divide instructions are an optional feature on the base machine! Success not guaranteed.
Come see the IBM 1401 computer at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, USA:
computerhistory.org/exhibits/...
Simulation and programming environment available here: github.com/lucaseverini/ROPE.
Mike Albaugh has made a page that explains how to run the same demonstration in the SIMH simulation: nulli.us/f1401/package.html
Some pointers on how to start programming the IBM 1401 on my website (work in progress): www.curiousmarc.com/computing...
Details on this implementation of FORTRAN: ibm-1401.info/1401-IBM-Systems...
IBM 1401 FORTRAN compiler source code: ibm-1401.info/1401-FORTRAN-Ill...
E-mail exchanges with the original developers of the IBM 1401 FORTRAN: ibm-1401.info/FORTRAN-e-mails....
Official CHM IBM 1401 Video: • 1401: The Dawn of a Ne...
More CuriousMarc IBM 1401 videos: • Debugging the 1959 IBM...
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At age 98, I do remember this system as the very best. IBM was the top of it's game. I still own a select two typewriter. 👍🇺🇸
Does that selectric still function? Also, do you have any other old IBM products?
Mr. Hahn, The old 1052! Subject of many horror stories! Operators used to literally “freesbie” them around the computer in blind fits of rage!
What do you develop in today?
wow i hope you live longer cause it would be awesome when you celebrate your 100 birthday age
@@danielmbcn Yes, we had computer even older than 100 years old. They were analog, mechanical computers.
Thanks for restoring this machine! Nostalgic... In the 60s I worked inside Cheyenne Mountain writing assembly language for the giant Philco 2000 system with the Philco 212 processor. All discrete transistors on boards... 32K of 48-bit words with an astounding speed of 1 MHz. Over two hundred instructions available. Two instructions per word so we could have assembly language programs with, at most, 64,000 assembly language instructions. We managed to track all satellites in orbit at the time (about 1100) and run differential correction of the orbits three times a day (they get perturbed by solar wind, gravitational anomalies, etc., and the orbit data has to be corrected frequently.) My colleague who was responsible for maintenance of the differential correction module was so pressed for space that he had to locate comments to the computer operators and shorten them to free up a tiny bit of space if he needed a bit more space. Things like "Mount tape 5 on Drive 7" became "Mt 5 - 7." Developing 2000 lines of assembly language (a box of cards) usually took 6 months! Could get only 1 run every two days and usually got back a 200 page core dump showing exactly what was in memory when my program blew up. Took hours to analyze and figure out what went wrong... I also operated and wrote programs for the Philco 1000 off-line system. Later I wrote assembly language for the IBM 360/85. Then I worked on Multics and wrote LOTS of FORTRAN. This was all great fun. Truly enjoyable strangely. Worked my way all the way down to the PC which I am still using and programming in Visual C++ and Android. We have come an incredibly long way in an incredibly short time. No one I worked with envisioned processors like the ones we have in cell phones. I am still enjoying writing code! Great fun!
Re: saving space. And some people never understood why years were stored as 2 digits.....
best comment ive read on anything computer related on youtube (and ive been binge watching old electronics videos) thank you for sharing!!!
you are one of a kind !! my first computer lenguage was FORTRAN IV in a 360. Just a year later, 1979, the 360 was dissmantled in my university and a new, way modern mainframe took its place. I am almost sure my class was the LAST class to punch cards and wait for the compiling and see results on paper, instead of screens. Intel 8080 was a big boom at that time and we started to work in binary day and night !!!! You belong to the pioneers (60's) and I belong to the microprocessor guys on the 80's. 8080, 8085, 6502, z80 from zilog, 6800 ... pretty funny times. Memory inside one integrated circuit was all volatile, and the 6116 (2kx8) was a HUGE thing at that time.
somewhere around here I have a Philco 2000 manual. I worked on an experiment at SDC called TATC (Terminal Air Traffic Control) that used the Philco for it's main processing.
Did you get to see any false alarms while you were working for them?
This computer is 61 years old. Can people really comprehend how much computer technology has change over 6 decades? Even the first IBM PC was created 20 years after this beast was build.
When I was in college in 1969 as a freshman I took a computer class in Fortran II. Yes, we used an IBM 1401 computer with a card reader and high speed printer. You didn't show the card punch machines though in your video. Those were in a separate room. We also had a separate card deck reader for checking the syntax of the card stack before it went to the computer. Our machine had 16K of core memory and a cycle time of 100us and no video monitor. Today 50 years later, my desktop computer has 32 Giga Byte of memory, 2 Tera Byte of solid state memory (SSD) and a cycle time of 333 Pico Seconds, built in floating point and matrix processors and an ultra high resolution monitor of 1920x1200 pixel 256 color palette, 32" LCD monitor. The old machines did real math and science and the new machines are used for social media and talking on Twitter and Facebook. Has the face of computers changed in 50 years.
Plenty of computers are still doing a lot of math!
I don't see how this whole computer thing is ever going to take off.
Seriously, why would anyone want such a machine in their home, let alone in their pocket!
Especially if they could just do calculations on an iPad instead
In 100 years the five richest kings of Europe will have one and that will be about it.
Pffff the sound of these machines are ear raping i can imagine that worker will get deaf after a day working with such computer systems,phew.
Subtle Demise: Those IBM Selectric typewritters hooked up to a small Black and White TV and 1kb of memory chips will never catch on.
The best memories I have with my Dad in the early 70's were of him taking me to the data processing room at the bank where he worked and letting me run some of the machines. I was just a little kid, and the old IBM mainframe equipment was huge. It was like going to the Batcave. The Reader/Sorter was my favorite. It was an amazing thing to watch. At some point I'd usually manage to jam it up. My Dad has been gone for nearly 30 years, but when I'm around computer technology I feel close to him.
Now no one can say tech is emotionless~
That's a great story Paul. You Dad still lives on.
Really nice story man! I remember back in 2000, my dad used to synch one of his watches using the computer screen, and for me it was just like witnessing magic! Guess that had an impact on my love for technology through my life :)
This is so pure, I cant stop crying
my high school had one,
My father worked for IBM from the early 60's until the 2000's - I remember piles and piles of that huge green printer paper all over the house - him coming home with huge rolls of tape - and those cards - OMG - the cards from HELL!
Took me to work with him one Saturday and he actually let me play with the card punch machine. He got in trouble on Monday morning because the card reader person had a pile of cards that simply read "My name is Steven Eddy" - over and over and over.
He was a missile and trajectory specialist from the Army and worked on the programing that got the Apollo to the moon and back.
Later in his career he designed the program that helped destroy most of the Iraqi SCUD missile mobile launch devices after the SCUD had already been fired by using RADAR to track the missles for a short distance then extrapolating the trajectory information to target the firing position within seconds sending the coordinates to our missles launchers which operated similar to the missles at the start of the Iron Man first movie.
That's amazing!
greenbar paper
Looks like secret info 😁
That compiler was quite an achievement. Memory was really tight so the compiler had to work upside-down-- the source code was kept in memory and the compiler, all 97 passes of it, ran over the source code, making small changes. Unusual, and slow, but it worked.
you nailed it, that’s how it was done. We were quite impressed that they made it work!
Thank you very much for not only preserving this part of computer history, but get it running again, and filming it! Not everyone can visit all these places, so such videos are an important part of computer heritage. Including the hiccups, like the scene when the central processor goes into error and the operators need to decipher the status indicators. This wakes me up to the high level of reliability we've come to expect from modern cpus ... meltdown notwithstanding.
TheDiveO Agreed!
Well said!
I wonder whether it was a bit more reliable when it was new. This thing is 58 years old now. I don't have many 15 year old computers left that still function as reliably as when they were new, they're all dying off like flies right around now, in fact components that are older than 6 or 7 years are starting to show issues.
Siana Gearz probably a mixed bag, with some things being more robust and then some weak spots placed at central places...
Was there a "they don't make them like they used to" comment here that disappeared? Because every single damn time somebody says that, a Commodore VC-20 dies and a ZX Spectrum loses its expansion bus. They don't even need anything to age or deteriorate, they just don't want to live on this planet, never did - and it's not like they were major engineering mishaps, it's just what things used to be like. In fact i'm amazed that I can abuse modern components and I usually wouldn't have a single data loss event or hardware malfunction for years on end, and that in spite of a complexity that is completely beyond grasp.
the irony is that the error display on the blinkenlights is easier to decode than your average MS Windows error code
Gord Slater “Something happened :(“
Fatal exception 345d332 at adress 344ab232223a of virtual subsystem 4...
Faildows.
at least the lights say something useful and not "smashed" like m$ windows does! it makes sense!
Yeah, microsoft is a garbage.
As a programming student I know what it feels when you hit F9 and after a while compilation is complete, but I can only imagine how it was back then when you had to take all your prepared punchcards, load them into a reader and go to printer for results. I can only see that the joy of compiled program is always the same :)
And of course the immortal turning it off and on again ;)
imagine loading and running fortran on your cellphone for the giggles factor and saying well my phones faster🤣
Oh my! That brings back memories! I actually operated a 1401 computer in the 1960's.
Are you in the 80s today? I wish you to stay healthy!
@@kennethkho7165 Not quite!
I wonder- will there be a guy, 50 years in the future, going through extreme efforts, sourcing parts from around the world, to bring an iphone back to life and play flappy bird on it?- like his grandpa used to in the old days?
Nice video- I really like that you actually use your stuff and not just stare at it!
If there is, we can't begin to imagine the support hardware and emulators they'll be using 50 years from now. Some of it might be used to cut through our current protection schemes like butter.
I doubt those iPhones will be still working in 10 years! I restore old radios as a hobby and have radios from the 30 that sound better than the stuff that comes out of the modern electronics.
Thing is, to repair a modern phone you'd need gigantic factory clean rooms to produce LCDs and microchips. You can fix these old things with a couple of spanners and a screwdriver.
greenaum, disagree. There are lots of people repairing high-tech devices. Look at such TH-cam channels as iPad Rehab and Louis Rossmann - they rely on supply of replacement parts, but fortunately not everything dies at the same time, there is quite a bit of salvage and there's some overproduction and new old stock, and repair is even more financially viable and thus more common in low-income countries. We also extend and repair old computers occasionally, classic 8-bit machines from the 80ies, by replacing whole functional units with newly developed ones, what needed a factory back then can be done in an FPGA now. Decoding decapped circuits automatically is in its infancy at the moment on the software side, but the hardware is affordable, we can easily make high resolution images of 80ies IC innards. Who knows what kind of hardware prototyping and reverse engineering technologies we're going to have in 50 years, but chances are, they will develop alongside the end use hardware and trickle down to hobbyists and historical computing enthusiasts eventually.
@greenaum Back in the day, the parts for these machines were prohibitively expensive for most people. Now we can get the chips for a few cents each, or emulate the ones we can't get. So I have no doubt that in 50 years time, if we need a replacement iPhone screen to get the antique working again, we'll just order a modern compatible part, or perhaps more likely by then, just 3D print/replicate a fully working one!
You know one of the most impressive things to me is those tape machines. They spin and stop those big heavy reels so quickly and accurately. The level of machining involved would be high even by today's standards.
The tape reels themselves didn't need to be very accurate, they are only feeding out tape slack, which is a separate process from reading the tape. If you look closely at the tape machines, under each reel, on either side of the big blue panels, is a glass covered compartment where a long loop of tape can hang down. The reel spins fast to pay out slack as needed to keep some length of tape hanging down. A separate feed motor then moves the light-weight loop of tape through the read head with precision. The take up real then spins as needed to take up the slack-loop past the read head. This means that the spinning reels themselves don't move in sync with the read head activity, they are just playing catch-up to keep the hanging loops of tape at a manageable length. The loops of tape are basically FIFO buffers, which is pretty clever.
How fascinating! I was wondering why both reels were moving out of sync. Definitely impressive how fast the motors wind/unwind the spools though.
I think its funny that people think thats impressive now. Cassettes do the same thing, and nobody goes crazy over them being precision pieces of engineering.
@lobsterbark: That's because cassettes are tiny so moving fast and starting/stopping quickly come with the territory. Same reason why a toy car that accelerates faster than a sports car isn't impressive to most people. It's not the speed alone that's impressive, it's the fact that something so large and heavy is capable of those speeds and levels of acceleration.
@lobsterbark: Cassette drives don't do nearly as much as those tape drives. All they do is move a tape across a head at a fixed speed, and in computer terms take forever to come up to speed and stop. The drives in this video are 10x more sophisticated. Of course they also probably hold 1/10 as much data...
I loved this video. When I began studying computers in 1967, this is what they looked like.
I recognize all the equipment in the video (except that modern Tape Emulator), and understand everything the people in the video are saying. I worked my way through college by operating a Honeywell 200 computer which was very similar to the IBM 1401 in the video. I mounted tapes on tape drives, loaded cards into a card reader/punch, and loaded paper into the printer. And I wrote FORTRAN II programs and punched them into cards by using an IBM 026 keypunch just like the one in the video.
I loved all of it, and enjoyed learning and using the constantly advancing technologies during my 25-year career as a software engineer.
Wow, what memories. In 1961 to 1965 I was writing code for 1401s and 1410s at Eglin AFB, including an autocoder compiler for a two tape drive 1401-729 configuration, and modifying the 1410 operating system. IBMs 1401 autocoder required 3 drives. Our 1401s could not load code from tape, we needed a small loader deck on cards. Programs were compiled to cards, then loaded and run. Our FORTRAN work was all done on 709, 7090 and 7094 computers. This was primarily ballistics work for the Eglin missile Test range. After getting out of the AF, I joined the University of Wyoming, where our primary box was a Philco 2000.
The guys in the red shirt are the zen masters, the jedi, the keeper of the holy grail of computing!
Remember the stories of older programmers when they dropped the stack of cards onto the floor and then had to sort the program again! Reading the memory dump after a program crash was nothing for them. Extremely deep understanding how everything works together.
Speaking as an old guy, it was a feature in some languages that columns 73-80 had a sequence number (assigned by the programmer), so in the event the card was dropped, you could restore the correct order in a card sorter - which is an entirely different piece of history. In order to sort cards, you sorted one column at a time, sorting on the columns from right to left (ie 80,79,78,77,76,75,74,73) and your cards were back in order. Or you wrote a FORTRAN program to read the cards, sort them in memory, and use the punch capability to punch out the cards in the correct sequence
> jedi
:cringe:
@@artnc4139 If you had the foresight to sequence them. :-) Sometimes a dropped deck would mostly just fan out and it wasn't TOO hard to put back in order.....(personal experience)
Nice to have some oldtimers here sharing their experiences. I'm so much in awe of early computing. The way more mature tech in my smartphone not so much.
@@stan.rarick8556 I heard from some of the old dinosaurs that people would draw on their cards with markers. Big diagonal lines. So that if you dropped a box, you could put them back together by joining up the lines.
Still, punch tape was available back then, all one long piece. I dunno why the industry used cards instead. Even player pianos had nice, wide and long, rolls to store their data. I think punch cards is something to do with them being used back in the early 20th Century on mechanical adders, sorters, etc, the stuff IBM used to do. Stuff was made compatible, so nobody thought to improve the system.
I was delighted to find this video. In 1960 I started a co-op program at IBM Rochester and got hired in 1962. One of the first machines I worked on after getting hired was the 1402. It had just been transferred to Rochester for production from Endicott where it was developed. One of the projects I got early on was to try and fix a bad oil leakage problem on the geneva mechanism in the punch station. I finally did make a few design changes that fixed most of it. One of the changes was to put those little vents you see on top of the geneva to release pressure from between the starwheel bearings. To help identify the problem I had the model shop machine a geneva housing out of acrylic so I could see inside while it ran. I still have that model. Nice work guys.
Second Wind Music Wow, you are people from a really distant Era
@@pattykuvshin русские еее
That exit sign probably has more computing power.
Per square inch?
These old geeks are having the time of their life... and I'd be there right with them if I lived near by. Spent my early adult life writing Fortran, PL/1, and 360 Assembler code on early IBM 360 series machines. Amazing what we got done on 32K of core and 20M hard drives.
Pretty incredible that there's more processing power in the camera being used to record this video than there is in all of that amazing hardware. I absolutely love these videos. Great work everyone!
There's more processing power in a pic microcontroller, let alone the camera.
Even a PIC12, which costs just a few cents in bulk, is much more powerful. They have a lot less RAM and IO though.
Not only processing power, also megapixels.
In comparison, a digital video camera is pure science fiction.
Think about this: the charge control circuitry for the lithium battery that powers the camera probably has at least a couple of magnitudes more processing power than the 1401. Although, arguably that circuitry might not be a general purpose computer. Then again; it might be. If it uses a microcontroller.
It's absolutely mind-blowing to think about. I mean, there are fidget spinners out there that cost maybe a tenner that are thousands of times more powerful in terms of processing power.
Or how about this? You can get a cheap, ugly, plasticy digital wristwatch on eBay for about a dollar that's built on a microcontroller running at a hundred times the clock speed of the 1401. And all that power is contained in a little silicon die that's smaller than a finger nail.
I love watching videos like this one that shows a bit more of how an old system actually works. It really puts things into perspective.
this video is not about comparison, when this machine was around the camera you mentioned didnt exist yet
Love it ! Makes me feel so old. I am 60 years old and first programmed in FORTRAN in 1976 On CDC Cyber 173 machines. Well done.
I was an IBM 1401 programmer back around 1960 writing in Autocoder and Cobol working for WR Grace & Company in New York City. They had an IBM 1401in their shop. It was their newest piece of equipment.
Your article mentions multiplying two forty digit numbers taking about 15 minutes. I remember there was a document which included the timeing for each operation. The time to multiply two words was a function of the length of each word. One of the other clowns, not me, set the computer to multiply two LONG words, something like 500 or 1000 digits each.
The program would probably still be running today if somebody had not interrupted processing.
Oh for the good old days.
Wish my Dad was still around, he would have seen that and, in a way only he could, explain the problem with expletives added in for good measure! He could read that crap! Thanks for saving these and trying to make them work.
This museum tops my bucket list, like it is a must-see before I even graduate. I imagine it's a life-changing experience.
btay64 where is that museum anyways?
Seeing a 1401 IBM is life changing?
If looking at an old computer from 50 years ago is life changing. Then I feel sorry for you mate
Mountain View California. I flew there just to see this
I started (in the mid 60's) on an IBM 1620-IID -- with disk! FORTRAN IID as well as assembly language. What a trip! For a number of years I bounced back and forth between FORTRAN and assembly code, doing a lot of work re-coding FORTRAN libraries and subroutines into hand-optimized assembly code. Went on to do OS development (in assembler) at SDS (Sigma 5, 6, 7, 9, 560), and DEC (VAX/VMS). Still coding today, mostly in Python (or whatever it takes to do the job). And while the hardware has gotten incredibly more powerful, on the software side, some times printing "I got to #3" is the best we can do for debugging, so many decades later!
Stumbled on this. My first time programming was on an IBM1401. Brings back memories.
I can tell Mike Albaugh has been around awhile -- he knows how to correctly fold the first sheet!
LOL, I was thinking the exact same thing...
This is quite amazing. The very first IT class I took in Jr. College was the very last Fortran class taught using cards. I averaged 2 bad cards for every good card. Thanks for bringing back such amazing memories for me. The sound ... the tapes... the green bar.... Funny you had to put a subtitle on the video stating the cards contained the program.
reminds me of a book i picked up from a Salvation Army. was a paperback textbook of some sort that taught coding FORTRAN IV. I have yet to ever fully read through the book, but it had an entire chapter dedicated to punch cards lol
That would have been a fast “load-and-go” compiler created at the University of Waterloo. Great for teaching. I think it got its speed by compiling to code that was either threaded or interpreted. Or both.
Don't forget the coffee cup on the 1401.....until the paper ran out.
Can't believe I was inside that room on this winter. Unforgettable!
As an undergraduate, I took my first FORTAN course in 2nd year (1978), and was offered a student assistant, and T/A position as a result of my performance in that course. I was working on a CDC-6400, 60 bit word 5.5 bit ASCII ... and punch cards were familiar, if not the most desired input mechansim (we got acess to dialup via acoustic couplers on a terminal which used phone dialup at 300 Baud) ... 1401's were considered obsolete by then ... but this is a FANTASTIC look at how computing began ;-)
Wonderful. So nice to see the old computers operational.
From now on I will respect all modern PC's that I access. They have such a backstory.
Brings back great memories. We had a 1401 at devry in Chicago. A teacher and I (student) played around with this machine writing different programs etc. Loved working with the tape drives. We had a washing machine hard drive connected too. The school had several programs that would play music on the printer. Thank you for the way back machine memory.
Boy does this take me back to the summer of ‘74 when I was 17. I was working at a book typesetter in Allentown, and we had a computer like this in the basement. It took up an entire room. The cables were in the floor and the room was kept cool. I love hearing the sounds of these machines running again, thank you so much! If someone had told me back then that 50 years in the future we could create a book on a laptop computer, I wouldn’t have believed it!
I haven't seen that paper in so long that I forgot it even existed, my memory is going. Just to see dot matrix font again was wonderful thanks.
Thank you and everyone involved in this amazing effort to keep these examples from the days of our digital origins running properly and well documented!
And as Always the good old IT Crowd helped again: "
Have you tried turning it 'off' and 'on' again?"
Basic troubleshooting for any device that operates on electricity. Step one turn it off then on. Step two lift slightly and drop before turning on.
@@dadillen5902 Absolulty not wrong, but sometimes could be handled without if the system is more stable. Maybe start fully supporting ECC could help^^ (caugh *ntel caugh )
I love this channel and the restoration community. You guys are like inverse pioneers rediscovering the past and bringing it back to life!
Hard part number 1, building something no one has ever built before. Hard part number 2, restoring something no one documented.....
Thanks so much for the video, I had a spare day in Santa Clara last year while over for a business trip and thought I'd spend an hour browsing through the Computer History Museum, over 6 hours later I was being told they were closing up and I had to leave. Incredible place and the memories it brought back for me were amazing. I started work in mainframes in the late 80's, but by that time they were running disk packs mainly with tape only left for archive/backup. Fascinating to see these early machines working again, well done to all who've helped preserve them.
Very nice. Takes me back to my college days where we had an IBM 360 in our Computer Engineering lab. Fortran was the language used by my Chemical Engineering class to study "Chemistry and the Computer."
And in 1976, I worked ar IBM in San Jose and one of my jobs was bootstrapping an IBM 369 to run MVS and VM for mainframe printer test operations. The amazing Argonaut 3800 xerographic High Speed Printer Subsystem. I was "acting FE" on 3 units, keeping the operators up to speed and running engineering change tests with production simulations. 20 to 60 boxes of paper per shift. Minimum of half a pallet!!! On each printer.
So about 20 years ago I was working at IBM and one of the young guys said that he told his grandfather that he worked for IBM. Grandad said, "Well, at least you don't have to support VM." The fellow replied, "Grandfather, I support VM."
@@amazing763 VM? This flashy thing with bells and whistles? Try MVS :)
I‘m about to finish my bachelor in computer science, but have never seen one of those computers operating up to now! Only knew them from movies and old pictures.. Thats really impressive! Thank you very much for sharing!
An amazing machine. The lengths the designers, engineers and manufacturers went to run what would be utterly trivial functions now is astounding. Thank you for showing us.
I don't get why people want light and thin notebooks, this seems pretty portable to me...
I agree, I have a box truck, its no prob at all
Wait, does it have a handle on it?
It has a jet engine
Never ever use a computer you can throw.
TheUnclePecos hulk agree with you
Very nice too watch. And congrats for doign all the work to get something like this acutally working again.
Honestly, this is the image of computers people had in mind back in the old days. High-tech rooms with lots of complicated machines and lots of blinking lights.
And even though even the most simple microcontroller is now much faster, reliable and powerful, in a way these machines look much more impressive than a simple tablet or laptop now.
The 1401 was before my time. I was a computer operator for the 360/370. The punch card machine at 19:53 really takes me back, however. It's funny how just a few old images and sounds rekindle a cascade of other memories. I clearly remember the raised floors and the tape readers that we used -- very similar to the tape readers shown in this video. Thank you very much for restoring these old machines. I work on cloud systems and massive servers now, as well as embedded systems which seem tiny today but are far more powerful than the IBM and CDC mainframes of my youth. I can personally vouch, however, that as with old cars, knowing how old computer equipment worked really does help you work with new equipment. It may seem odd, but it's the failures that teach you the most. So many of our present ideas will be revealed as mistakes in the future. Looking back helps us remember that lesson, as well as many others. Thanks again.
My first language was Fortran 4 on the IBM 360/370 myself. Atlanta Area Technical School as it was known at the time.
Same here! I also started as an operator on those machines, later on the 43xxs, and AS400s. Ops, programming in COBOL, tech support. It held my interest for quite some time, but the desire to slow down and minimize the stress eventually took hold. I gave it all up to become a woodworker, and that also took a toll, physically. Now I just focus on photography.
This reminds me of my dad's old work when I was a kid in the early 80s. So many tape drive cabinets. All you'd hear is tape drives roaring and dot matrix printers printing, and ill never forget that smell. It just smelled so clean. Like new electronics.
I think that the program generated a Hilbert matrix (a notoriously ill-conditioned creature), inverted it, multiplied the inverse with the initial matrix. It's a good test for determining computational accuracy.
+MrShobar: Yes, that's exactly what it did.
And as you have seen at the upper right.... precision was not the best
Glad you can see and hear well
MrShobar wow. Those printers I used for 4 years printing out medical records at my first real Tech job for a hospital over night !!
I ran into some matrix difficulties about twenty years or so ago. I found that singular value decomposition (from the excellent book "Numerical Recipes in C") saved the day...
This is amazing. When I started my college in 1985, card deck readers and magnetic tape machines were still there to load old programs but it was already antiquated and we never used it.
I always wanted to try it out, but I never had a chance to use it.
Seeing it’s actually working was just amazing.
Thank you for amazing restoration and filming it!
Computer history is fascinating, I remember learning about the ENIAC, vacuum tubes and all. The evolution of information technology has to be among the most exciting of all the sciences. The transistor changed everything. A child powering up a tablet has no idea the power they have in their hands, when the ENIAC powered up, it used so much power it caused a blackout in the city.
Salute to all the pioneers still alive in this chat. Thank you for everything.
This brings back memories. I used to work on Univac 418-IIIs back in the day.
So glad I found this! What a wonderful documentary... and it's actually working! I got to see one of these at the Seattle World's Fair in 1962!
Fascinating! Thank you for documenting all this
During the first years of the 21st Century, I worked for the US Navy on fire-control systems using digital computers (in the 1970s I was there when the old electro-mechanical fire-control calculators were replaced by digital computers, as the ships went through major overhauls -- much like the STAR TREK ENTERPRISE did from the TV show version to the first movie version). These then-new computers used the large reel-to-reel tapes shown here (exactly the same), though the tape drive machines were much heavier and "Mil-Spec" against shock, water, and so forth (these were warships, after all). By the early 21st Century, getting these tapes was becoming more and more expensive, since almost everybody else had switched over to CD or DVD drives -- after some security problems, thumb drives were forbidden on any US DoD computer, period. So we had to change over the tapes to CDs for the ships I was working on at the time, the FFG-7 Class Guided-Missile Frigates (used by the US and several foreign nations). This involved doing a file-by-file transfer to the CD in the exact same format as was on the tape, faking the tape marks and so forth that the tape generated during writing and reading. Special programs had to be written to create this tape-on-CD image, with appropriate formatting on the CD to allow reading by the modified CD drives replacing the tape drives. We had A LOT OF tapes (different ships had slightly different configurations and each had to have its own tape and, now, CD) and we had to do a complete test verification using our in-house simulators on each new CD to make sure that it was operating properly, then make backup copies, then have ship copies made ready for when the ship replaced its tape drives for CDs -- the ships would need them immediately to finish their overhauls, obviously -- and document and label each one for retrieval in a set of cabinets in our test site and media storage room (out small part of a huge multi-functional building). This took a few months to set up the hardware, create a set of procedures, test them for correctness, do some tests, fix the bugs, then finally go through all of the tapes, the first ones being those for the ships closest to tape drive replacement, and make the several CDs of each one. Only then could we throw out the tapes as the ships converted (we sometimes had to send ships new media due to user or machine error destroying their own copies, so we had to hang onto the tapes until the last possible moment). Lots of interesting work!
I am *seriously* impressed! I could watch this video over and over! My hat is off to you! Thank You for giving me a glimpse into what is (with certainty) a laborious love of computational machines. My arrival in computing was later (System/360, paper *tape* on a teletype, in college it was cards) but I sure do appreciate this awesome restoration!
This makes me immensely happy in a way I can’t really explain. Well done!
11:30 "The following is for hardcore fans..." lol you've made it this far in the vid and NOW comes the part for hardcore fans!
Helium Road at that point I was like Jesus I thought I WAS hardcore! Damn!
Awesome. I am starting to gain a real appreciation for our forefathers and their computers. I just love the history of them...
I started working on computers in 1967, Although it was with a different brand, we had the same kind of card reader, tape reader, line printer, etc. and I started learning to program with Fortan II. This video brings me back many memories !
These computer are the things which made humanity what it is right now. I respect these people who were behind making these!
I love you guys! Mike is a great guy too lol
Just wow. I grew up with Windows 3.1, followed by 95, 98, XP and 7.
This old machine is enormous and fascinating considering the time it was built. I only know programming with punched cards by stories from my IT teacher back in school.
First job as an operator was on an IBM 1401 at Ford Motor Co at Halewood plant in Liverpool England, 1965. Retired in 2019 after 54 years in IT. I worked at every job you could do in IT, in my 54 years, including running my own Managed Facilities company.
Pretty amazing that in only a few decades we would go from this to desktop PC's where we really are still to this day.
It’s turing complete. It can do anything except read the last card.
Genuinely thrilling - amazing job!
"Rewind the compiler!" As a programmer those words, and seeing this thing operate, put a massive grin on my face 😁
The 1401 was the first computer that I learned to program and operate back in 1967 at college. That one had a disk drive which made things a bit more "friendly". Thanks for the memories!
This is quite something to see in action.
It was back in '74 as well. :)
I developed software written in EasyCoder for the 1401 card system, (no disk), from 1964 - 1965; then used Autocoder on a 1401 disk system from 1965 through 1970. Great era to be a progammer.
I was an IBM system engineer at that time. Ah deus ex machinations and we were the high priests,.
I was IBM systems engineer at that time. ah, deus ex machina and we were the high priests
@@paulcule2091 So cool man!
I remember the systems setup very well, good to see it all in action once again.
This was all very wonderful to see (and hear) again. I learned all of this when I was 14-17. Very exciting time of my life.
"Good afternoon Hal, how is everything going?" "Good afternoon Mr Amer. Everything's going extremely well." 🔴
...
"Just a moment. Just a moment. I've just picked up a fault in the AE-35 unit"
For all those hipsters who can't fit their fancy Kotlin code in 4 GB of RAM, the punishment should be to work on these. That will teach you optimizations.
the initial size of an application is smaller than 100 MB. Then the VM creates and removes a lot of data structures, but according to the garbage collector's algorithms, there are no reasons to purge unnecessary memory until OS did not require it explicitly.
@@vladislavsabenin8473 So, spoken like a typical moron writing these sh*tty modern toy languages.
@@icedout7606 just look at the code they produce for the CPU
@@alexeymarkov8675 you mean compiler assembly output?
@@icedout7606 yes, sure
I started my IT career as an operator of a "small" IBM 360/25. We loaded a 1401 emulator into the 360 and ran old business applications. This video brings back old memories; card readers, punches, sorters and line printers. Thanks!
T.H.I.N.K. B.I.N.G.O!
Let me extend you a warm salute from Peru!
I was the chosen to program and operate an IBM S/36 Pilot Program in Peru.
Secret project conducted in Moquegua, a little place inside of Peru very far from the metropoli.
And when we sent our reports to Lima...
They hated us!
We were doing what they should be doing.
Very interesting experience.
I feel nostalgic about the cafeteria of IBM del Perú.
You could load EVERYTHING in your plate.
As much as you wish.
And the routine was saving some bread to feed our pool filled with big colored goldfishes in our route back to the intelligent edifice.
And to admire our piece of Pye which was three big rocks that came from a dolmen extracted from some place in Great Britain were instead of the real dolmen should be artificial rocks.
This is a big secret.
You should not tell this to anybody unless you plan to kill them after listening.
Ha ha ha!
I'm amazed how sci-fi this looks. Seeing these mechanical machines move, makes this compter look extremely high-tech and futuristic. The amazing abrupt movement patterns of the tape-machines, moving with what looks like amazing speed and accuracy... and the same perceived amazing speed and accuracy (and noise) of the printer and punchcard machine... Being able to see these parts move gives a whole different feeling to a computer. And while you can't see the CPU work, the buttons and light and just knowing that it controls the rest of the machines that you CAN see working, makes it seem majestic and all-controling (i now see where the "evil AI" idea comes from... :)). *THIS LOOKS LIKE THE FUTURE!!!* The sheer size of it all also helps making it look very important and powerful.
You can see why that style of tape drive was a very popular prop whenever somebody wanted to depict a computer on TV or in a movie, for decades afterwards. In fact, well into the 1980s, long after they had disappeared from most computer rooms.
What Lawrence said. It was often the IBM card sorting machine that was the "computer" in old science fiction movies, the tape drive was quite a bit later but when they used the real deal it was reasonably impressive.
So you essentially had to emulate an FPU on a machine that didn’t have one, yes? That’s seriously cool!
And that tape-emulator hardware!! Wow!!! This is so incredibly impressive!!
There were also FPU emulators for 386 machines that lacked the 387 FPU.
The Intel 486 SX CPUs with lacked a hardware FPU or had them disabled. The higher priced DX lines had them.
they didn't write the compiler themselves. the FPU emulator is part of the compiler.
I remember the old Amigas - the 68000 processor didn't have an FPU and used an FPU library, but I think you could get an optional 68881 FPU.
People have written floating point emulators for incredibly basic video game scripting languages before. It's not that hard to do. The actual problem is that it is extremely slow.
Amazing. Having started out on Mainframes (albeit ICL 2900s on VME/B and VME/K), this brought back so many happy memories of working in a Machine Hall at ICL Bracknell (BRA01) as a Junior Oper ,, remembering all the sights and sounds of those wonderful early days ... Thank you.
That made me so happy. I worked at some "modern" IBM mainframes, where all of that is "emulated" (like how it calls lines of a batch job as "card" - or the serial output as "printer"). It was so heartwarming to see the joy of everyone in this video - even when everything crashes and they had to troubleshoot CPU registers and using non-ASCII tables.
That loud screech, throughout the video, would drive me nuts after awhile!
Madness832 Your brain can leave it out of awareness, but when it is recorded trough microphone, brain has to proses it equally to any other sound. That is reason why bigger movies has totally fake soundtrack.
My directional microphone got totally overwhelmed by it. Normally you operate the printer closed, and it's tolerably quiet. We opened it up to film what it was printing, and it becomes unbearably loud when you are close to it.
I work in datacenters sometimes. They have earplug dispensers outside the halls. You get accustomed to the constant drone of fans.
"I am now going to tell the computer exactly what it can do with a life times worth of chocolate"
can I watch youtube on this computer ??
I started programming FORTRAN 4 in the early 80s, I guess university had an IBM360 but I never knew all the operator job done to get my programs ready the next day, now I got it!, I still remember doing my flow diagrams and get cards perforated in an old fashion card writer desk and my job card as the first card in the deck! Thanks for sharing!
Watching this video was really, really fun.
Reminds me of my FORTRAN course at the university of Aachen in the 1980ies. We still had to punch the code on cards. Two fellow students and myself developed the code on paper, cut the listing into thirds, each student typed in a third of the code, we merged the three decks and triplicated it as each student had to pass in his/her own deck of cards. It happened quite often that one of the programs returned with a syntax error due to an incorrectly punched hole when we checked the results the next day.
Now that is a real computer right there :-)
It'd be really funny to record a phone call with IBM for technical support on the 1401 today! I wonder what they'd say.
'Nah; Columbus was 1492.'
Two IBM generations later, I once raised a priority 1 call with IBM technical support. It was as if I hit the fire alarm: I had phone calls from all directions in IBM - around six at the same time. It was very embarrassing because it was my own stupid mistake. Thus we learn ...
"Did you turn it off and on?"
"1st go to lower left corner and click start..."
"Is it plugged in?"
I worked in IBM for 14 years and happy to see this guy working :D
I remember traveling to Huntsville to get access to a 7090. The 1401 was used to generate an imput tape of the Fortran simulation that was then run on the 7090. The output tape from the 7090 was then put on the 1401 to generate the printout!
Yes, the IBM 1401 was often used to front end the big IBM 7090 scientific number cruncher. The 1401 had far better I/O, with the very fast 1402 card reader and 1403 printer and 7090-compatible 729.tapes. So tapes were created on the 1401, then mounted on the 7090 for doing the actual heavy computing. Back to the 1401 for printing, card punching, etc…
"It works now, Not sure what happened the first time" Story of my life, I guess some things haven't changes since the IBM 1401
I love that game: Team Fortran 2
Hmm
team fortnite 2
Nice to see people preserve old tech, no matter how old. Good job!
my father worked for IBM for several decades, for some reason as a kid I amassed a collection of unadhered control panel bezel decals (i loved stickers so my dad gave me spares), so many of their transparent areas made no sense to me as a child, some of them are starting to make more sense now. thank you!
Compiling by parchment and quill. I don't miss the batch days one "bit".
It would be a good idea to pull the write ring on that compiler tape, now that you know it works. :-)
To translate - the plastic ring is a mechanical interlock that allows a tape to be written. By removing the ring, the tape drive cannot accidentally overwrite the tape containing the compiler
or more simply, "no ringie, no writie"
or even better... "press the any key on the tape unit after inserting the tape thingie"
They made a great Frisbee when we got bored, 😂
it is mind boggling to understand the procedure of operating these computers but it is amazing to dive back in time to see how much we’ve progressed. Everyone takes technology for granted now and forgets the struggles of the past. Props to everyone that keeps these machines up and running.
Wow. You used to get a hell of a lot more exercise using computers back then.
Amazing! I wonder how easy it would be to do up a 1401-compatible ASCII art Mandelbrot printing program in FORTRAN II. I know there's at least one Fortran 95 program on github that allows this, and this led me to find a book on archive.org stating there's actually FORTRAN IV released for the 1401... so I guess the next challenge that I can at least see fit, would be running FORTRAN IV and doing pretty ASCII art Mandelbrots with it :D
Already done by Ken (in Autocoder assembly): www.righto.com/2015/03/12-minute-mandelbrot-fractals-on-50.html
Unfortunately I didn't have my camera when he did it.
Well then. I've been bamboozled!
also, dunno if Luca passed along my regards, but I'm the guy he got the 68040 card from (that seemingly had a missing MLCC SMD cap I didn't even notice before putting on ebay, oops!) :D
Technically that'd be EBCDIC art.
@@greenaum It seems to actually use a predecessor of EBCDIC, according to WP. The use of BCD encoding for text is shown in the video at 4:25, the translation table may be unique to this system. The printer likely worked with the same character set.
Is there enought knowledge of those old systems for future generations to be able to use or demonstrate it? Sorry for my bad English and greetings from Sweden!
I'm sure these guys have everything documented, it'll probably run til the end of time now then.
Feast with 1401 knowledge: ibm-1401.info/
Thank you for your service in preserving computer history Mr. Code Wizard
Wow! We had one of them at the university so late as 1980/1... it was one of the last models manufactured on 1970/1... We used it for some microelectronics simulation in the lab. Great time... thank you very much for share that video. Now let me looking for my all time favorite: Burroughs B6700, the first serious computer I worked on!
In Huston terms: Main bus A overload ... :-)
Seriously, thank you for the great video!
I wouldn't have thought that the 1401 compiled to memory. - Was this an option or standard behavior?
Standard and only way to do it. Not enough memory to hold the Fortran compiler, so they chose to feed the compiler against the source code rather than feed the source code to the compiler. This was pretty unique and rather surprising that it worked at all! The Fortran compiler tape has 63 passes (!), which it runs one at a time against the code, progressively compiling the code in place right in memory.