The Rochester Institute of Technology heats one of its buildings during the winter with waste heat from the computers.

Legend has it that when your uncle (my father) was going to MIT in the early ’50’s his office was located next door to the room in which the Model Railroad Club was developing the first electronic computer. He’d warm his office in the wintertime with the heat from the vacuum tubes by opening the vents between the two rooms.

Ya don’t suppose that’s how I came by my natural geekiness, via radiation?

Even in the mini world you saw the innovation die when “professional” management took over successful tech companies from the engineers who founded them. The “professionals” weren’t interested in new products, they wanted to suck all of the profit possible from the old products. This concept is behind the decline of the manufacturing sector in the US, as plants and processes weren’t modernized, the work was shifted to new factories in other places, first in the South, and then overseas.

Badtux, I used the DEC-10 in Rochester, NY in the late 1970s. It was a local machine and system. Time sharing was common in Rochester, with local companies buying time on mainframes at the local universities, and some corporations selling excess capacity via modem terminals. It was a lot cheaper than any of the national systems, but there were limits on the windows of use.

That crank sounds like a better system than the toggle switches on most minis, Steve.

FWIW, I cut my teeth on the original Rice University Computer, designed and built there in the late 1950s both as an experiment in architecture and as a practical computing facility for the theoretical physicists etc. who kept exceeding the available horsepower on the IBM 7094. It was still in use in the late 1960s when I was an undergraduate.

The R-1 (yes, there was eventually an R-2, sort of) was an impressive piece of hardware for its time. I am glad I arrived after the CRT main memory had been replaced with core!

And yes, occasionally, standing at the main console that looked as if it could run the Starship Enterprise (the latter conceived of many years later), debugging some odd program or another, I reached out and turned the crank. Yes, that computer had a crank. The crank was connected to a cam that drove a microswitch, about 50 instructions per turn. While one cranked, one watched the registers in lights through the first Plexiglas case, which stood just beyond the console. The lights one watched were attached to the actual register circuits.

Those were the days! (I do not miss those days.)

This brings up a real problem with capitalism — the guys doing the innovation are not money guys and really don’t like running a business, so anybody offers them enough zeros on the check, they grab it and run and go do something else. Problem is, it’s *hard* to innovate, and they rarely end up doing anything else that’ll give them the same rush they got the first time.

Bryan — time on PDP-10 timesharing computers was quite common and available during the mid to late 1970’s and many high schools purchased time on Tymshare or its equivalent prior to the Apple II making it feasible for high schools to own their own computers. So if someone was born in the early 1960’s it wouldn’t surprise me if they had exposure to a PDP-10 during their high school years, presuming they were in a school district capable of handling the rather extravagant costs of having all those phone lines for 300 baud modems to talk to Tymnet and the hefty per-byte charges and per-CPU-minute charges. If I’m looking at timelines right, you were flying around the sky looking at the Ruskies at the time, so you probably missed out on that brief but important era in computing history when folks had access to mainframes via modem… the PC killed that concept deader than dead because why rent part of a mainframe when you can own a whole PC for less? So it goes…

Anya: Not scary at all! LOL 😉 Ya know what’s so great about those old systems? Predictability and reliability. 🙂

Badtux: The thing I always saw about COBOL was a curious dichotomy. It’s strength is also it’s weakness. 🙂 It was quite an *inflexible* language. Very simple, and very structured. But it was very predictable. A line of code did one simple thing (usually). That made complex systems quite large and certainly an equivalent ‘C’ program would be much more compact, but C goes the other way in being too flexible and generally less predictable. PL/1 scared me! It had a huge syntax! LOL But I also had to learn Algol (and Fortran) then PL/1 (eventually the simpler PL/M). COBOL Has evolved, and as you say, has less “ick”! 😀

When I began working in Industrial Design, I had to learn BCPL initially (which most people never heard off!) Then forth and Prolog, and a strange language called Occam which was used to program the amazing Inmos Transputers! *sigh* I loved those things! The Transputer and Occam were a dream come true for any engineer trying to develop complex automated systems. A UNIX company called Apollo had a Transputer Development System (TDS) for it. Apollo were a competitor to Sun Microsystems, and was eventually taken over by HP sadly. Apollo were amazing at the time as the OS it ran, called Aegis, was fully interoperable and compatible with Sys V, BSD & POSIX. IT had the fastest networking capabilities built in as standard (12Mb/s Token Ring, IBM’s at that time was 4Mb/s) and 10Mb/s Ethernet and fully supported diskless workstations (as drives were quite expensive back then, this was a big selling point).

Sadly, Inmos was taken over by Thompson and they buried commercial development of the Transputer in favor of Military development.

The thing that annoys me the most today (and for the past couple decades) is that companies that produce an excellent product get swallowed up by a big shark and the product either becomes mediocre or eventually is simply killed off in favor of the big shark’s mediocre products. Many companies, especially M$, HP, Symantec and others, do this often. It is difficult to produce excellence when the tools one is forced to use are mediocre.

Cheers.

Now, if you had time on a PDP-10 mainframe, that would be a surprise. I bought time on one for a couple of things, but it was done with a terminal connected via a modem.

Badtux, if you had been using a 029 keypunch for a while, the 3270 was high tech. I only had exposure to PL/1 at college, and the required programs weren’t very exciting, but the possibilities and logic were definitely more interesting than COBOL.

Face it, all you do with COBOL is re-write the same program in a slightly different fashion. I have a suspicion that some people didn’t like it because it produced good standard accounting results, and they wanted something a little more “adventurous” and “interesting”.

Scary.