Rats nest

[Enzo]

I was discussing wiring and such elsewhere, and was reminded of my days 50 years ago in the computer lab, learning FORTRAN, and sitting at an IBM 029 card punch machine. All our programs had to be typed onto IBM cards line by line, each line on a card. The machine punched holes in the card that could be read by the systems. There were other machines: card sorters, card printers/line printers, card duplicators. Each piece of equipment was programmed by a large plug board behind a panel. it was a big board of holes - a giant cribbage board - with wires that were plugged from here to there in a way the machine understood.

I always found those panels visually appealing.

[Lance]

Wow! Been a long time since I've seen anything like that.

They're before my time, but when I was an early teen my mother worked keypunch at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. She worked part-time in the evenings, so I would sometimes go in with her and use the recreational facilities with friends.

Behind the area she worked in, with the rows and rows of keypunch machines, sorters and other equipment was, through the several sets of security doors, was a magical room with many banks of 9-track tape drives, open platter disk drives, and boxes and boxes of blinkin' litez. The operators back there took a liking to me and would occasionally let me hang out with them back there. I think it helped shape my love for all things with blinkin' litez to this day. The below is a reasonable representation of the kind of computer room I'm talking about.

It's hard to imagine that the laptop I'm making this post from is more powerful that the entire contents of the building that housed those systems.

[Enzo]

The MSU computer lab took up most of a large building, but included classrooms et al. Up on the top floor was the computer itself. behind large windows on a raised floor (cooling ducts below), you could watch the blinking lights and spinning tape drives. people in white lab coats idly wandering around doing whatever lab rats do.

There was a number keypad by the access door for entry. next to that was a little loudspeaker with a volume knob. You could, while watching, dial up the speaker to listen to some sort of digital noise, which presumably came from within the computer. Sounded high tech at the time, but in retrospect was even less interesting a sound than the old modem noise we all know.

I think it was 1966, they upgraded to the new IBM360 system. By today's standards, it had laughably small memory, like maybe 100k, but at the time it was a big step up from the Univac something or other it replaced.

A few years later that was all replaced by a CDC4500 or something like that. 4700?