#9600 Modem
Aaah! The good old days!
The first computer I ever used was the university mainframe – an Elliott
803B. It was the fully expanded version – 8192 words of memory at 39 bits
(plus parity) each. The Algol compiler and run-time code took up about 75%
of this, and longer programs had to be compiled out onto paper tape. I had
the luxury of having two high speed paper tape readers, capable of almost
330 charcters per second (5 bits per character), but running at such a high
speed, the readers were prone to making errors, and I remember I had to
slug the code somewhat to drop the speed to a still fast 300 chars/sec.
The output devices were a pair of high-speed paper tape punches, which
zipped long at 100 characters per second. The output tape then had to be
wound up and carried next door to a spare Creed teleprinters (there were
three in all, for maximum throughput), where the output was printed at a
tolerably fast 10 chars/sec.
The computer was controlled via a keyboard, about the size of a desk, at
which instructions could be entered in machine code. Of course, as with
all the best computers, there was also a loudspeaker. The speaker was
pulsed every time a jump or floating point math instruction was executed
(yes, it even had a math co-processor!), and with a bit of cunning, you
could write a program to play a tune.
The processor was perhaps a little slow by modern standards – 576
microseconds for most instructions (excluding floating point math), but
only 288 microseconds for a jump instruction. Yes, microseconds, not the
new-fangled nanoseconds, but bearing in mind that it was a serial processor
(i.e. it carried out its instructions on a bit-by-bit basis, not
byte-by-byte), this was quite understandable.
Ah, the joys of twenty years ago!
Shraddhan
– via Whap!