Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Computing/Early computers task force

Article requests

I'd like to see an article on the Harris/6. The one I used was purchased new in 1977. Its had a card reader, a printer, two or three 9600 bpi tape drives, and 7 or 8 CRT terminals and some sort of interactive operating system. OS/6 maybe. I remember that operating system upgrades also required work with a soldering iron. The CPU+memory+tape drives occupied four refridgertor-sized cabinets.

Also, something on the Cyber Data Systems ((maybe, I forget the name now??)) that it replaced (which was later renamed/acquired by Scientific Data Systems. I think its was a CDS/1 or SDS/1 something like that. This machine had been purchased in 1959, had 32KBytes of true core memory, with 16KB each in a refridgertor-sized cabinet. (These were actually heavily insulated ovens, since the core was heat to near the Curie temperature to improve memory access time. It had a big control panel of switches and lights, and an IBM selectric specially wired in as a terminal. It had four full-size tape drives (i.e. 5 foot high, 3 foot wide). Typical operation: load source code on reel on drive at far left. Load tape containing compiler in the middle. Load blank tape for object code on right. Flips switches, IPL. wait for compile to finish. (progress is output on the selectric). Next, move object tape from right-most to left-most drive, replace compiler tape with linker tape. A new blank tape for the executable on the far right. Do the link step. Then to run the executable ... you get the idea. linas 02:51, 27 November 2005 (UTC)