[rescue] [geeks] Old School Documentation

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

Joshua D Boyd wrote:
 
> I found a massive store of old computer docs:

I'll bite, anyone else actually used any of these?

> Some highlights are documentation for the DG Nova:
> http://www.spies.com/~aek/pdf/dg/

Used but never programed, one place I worked at had a OMR (fill in the dots)
scanner run by one.
 
> documentation for Sun1: http://www.spies.com/~aek/pdf/sun/ 

Had a Sparcstation 1, but that was only a few years ago. :-)

> CDC: http://www.spies.com/~aek/pdf/cdc/

CDC6400, wrote in compass, fortran and (ssh) cobol. 

> IBM stuff (704, 360, 1130, etc): http://www.spies.com/~aek/pdf/ibm/

A little fortran and PL/I on 360's, lots of fortran and assembly language
on the 1130. Wish I had a 1500 (1130 with 15 display tubes, 5 disks,
2 tape drives, frame addressable 8mm movie projectors and some kind of
computer controlled audio tape).

Really obscure one: Anyone remember the 1130 patch to make a boot card
wait for the disk to come ready? It was done by sticking a chaff from a
keypunch back into a hole in the card and then duplicating it......

Did some autocoder program "repair" running in on the 1401 emulator on
a 370. 

Among the other stuff was the HP2100 series, which I programmed in BASIC
and assembly language. Wrote some nifty stuff for the front end processor
used in their high end basic systems circa 1971.

Now for an obscure one not in his collection, until I got married again (1989)
 I had the front panel from a Philco 1000 (I did some work on them too).
The 1000 was the late 60's equivalent of router on the defense department's
TTY network. I worked on what was probably the only civillian one.

I was hoping to make the lights blink.

Should have saved those manuals. I even had a copy of the SDS fortran manual
(which he does not). This manual became famous because of a comment like 
"if the value of PI ever changes", which was circulated about 3 years ago
on several computer humor lists, 30 years after it was published!

Geoff.
-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson
Bloomberg L.P., BFM (Israel) 2 hours ahead of London, 7 hours ahead of New York.
Tel:  972-(0)3-754-1158 Fax 972-(0)3-754-1236 Email: gmendelson at bloomberg.com