My first computer at Douglas Aircraft was an IBM 704. At JPL it was a
709 and then a 7094 (transistorized). We wrote in machine language
and Fortran and punched cards with each instruction line. 32K of
memory and tape drives. Our link to Goldstone was via 5-hole Teletype
paper tape, fed into a reader at JPL. Amazing what you can do with a
little computing power. We needed 16-digit precision and I wonder
what is used now to get that precision and possibly more. JPL had one
"Square Root Friden" calculator that we could use to verify the
programming.
A year later in grad school I was back to a 1620 like MJB.
-Roland
On Wed, 01 Jan 2014 16:11:54 -0700, MJB wrote:
>I started doing my high school homework on an IBM 1620. And after a
>quarter of a
>century as a sys admin at the U of U, and about that long with Team.Net,
>I've seen a
>lot of changes.
>
>I keep thinking I should spend a day or so digging out ALL the computer
>stuff I have
>stashed away in various places around the house, put it all in one big
>pile and post
>a few pictures. RealSoonNow.
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