The mini-montage is really full size. Expand, expand again, Copy, paste into Paint/etc, crop just that quadrant, it is over 1400x1100 pixels.
In the 1990s a ticket office, me as local wire-guy, and some vendor support reps were supposed to meet to hookup new ticket system. I got there, box-boss was there, and two really sleek mini-skirted women. We're standing around, I assume waiting on rep-geeks, when I realize these were not actresses from the theater next door but the support folks!
Not the first time my sexist assumptions were foiled. I had a stuck tie-rod on my Willys, needed The Tool. At the parts store were two guys and a gal, I assumed a bookkeeper. Well, the guys were busy and I tried to explain my need to the woman, and she offered "I just use Vice-Grips on my GTO!" Impressed.
Digital circuits made with vacuum tubes are interesting. The 1959 IBM engineer's manual for 700 series tube computers does lists many IBM modules schematics with explanations, tube load lines and also several pictures of the computer internal parts. Those circuits had usually a 140V B+ main supply and a -140V negative supply. Beside tubes, high speed relays and diodes had been used. Link to a copy of the pdf: http://uk2.filejumble.com/700circ.pdf
Non-programmable vacuum tube control circuits were also put togheter in a very different way compared to later solid state logic. Sadly those machines had been scrapped almost entirely. Decades ago, at a now vanished electronic scrapyard, I partially dismantled an industrial control unit that was tube operated. It had some sort of state machine logic implemented by a big step-by-step rotary mechanical relay with 100+ positions (the kind of relay that were also used on automated PBX exchanges), and many high speed decade counters that were implementes with cascaded flip-flops, each one of them built with a E180CC dual triode. The counter final value was presented by neon glow lamps. No nixie tubes, this machine seemed to have been built in the '50 before they became popular. The power supply racks were huge. Very nice ceramic tube sockets and high grade parts.
Non-programmable vacuum tube control circuits were also put togheter in a very different way compared to later solid state logic. Sadly those machines had been scrapped almost entirely. Decades ago, at a now vanished electronic scrapyard, I partially dismantled an industrial control unit that was tube operated. It had some sort of state machine logic implemented by a big step-by-step rotary mechanical relay with 100+ positions (the kind of relay that were also used on automated PBX exchanges), and many high speed decade counters that were implementes with cascaded flip-flops, each one of them built with a E180CC dual triode. The counter final value was presented by neon glow lamps. No nixie tubes, this machine seemed to have been built in the '50 before they became popular. The power supply racks were huge. Very nice ceramic tube sockets and high grade parts.
Our main system at work (which they are trying to migrate off at the moment) is written in cobol. So yes there are still systems out there using it (and they have still been getting modifications to the code up until this year.... I think they only have one cobol programmer left though). I was writing cobol in the late 80's, though I was using it for systems programing tasks rather than business logic. I wrote an automation system that would generate the JCL for all of the programs, based on questions asked of the person installing the system. Brought the time down from two weeks to two days to install a new system.
Some photo's below which I'm sure I have posted before. Partial view of a CPU card out of a facom M380A mainframe. I think there were 16 of these cards all up that made up the CPU. The mass of wires is the reverse side of the board, complete with fine tuned delay loops.
When we decommed the mainframe the boss told us any souvenir's we wanted we could take. This was mine. The engineer at the time (around 1992) told us that brand new (as a spare part) one of these boards would be around $28K.
Tony.
Some photo's below which I'm sure I have posted before. Partial view of a CPU card out of a facom M380A mainframe. I think there were 16 of these cards all up that made up the CPU. The mass of wires is the reverse side of the board, complete with fine tuned delay loops.
When we decommed the mainframe the boss told us any souvenir's we wanted we could take. This was mine. The engineer at the time (around 1992) told us that brand new (as a spare part) one of these boards would be around $28K.
Tony.
Attachments
For any particular picture in high resolution you can search google. Provided you have lower size/resolution picture. You can go to google > Images and side by side open your file manager window and drag and drop that particular image file in google image search. It will provide you same/similar images in various resolutions. Sometimes you have to type appropriate name. In this case it turned out to be 'office in the 80s' here is the link.
Regards.
At home PC front I studied Basic Language Programming (93-94). Which I suppose can not even be compared to higher level Cobol and Fortran. Much respect to those who did programming on it.
In those days I was in awe of Amiga Computers and Silicon Graphics computers. Amiga were comparatively expensive then PCs. But their operating system and hardware was ahead of its time. My friend used to do animation and titling of advertisements for Cable TVs on Amiga. PCs were coming with VESA bus architecture slots, which were expensive too. But it never took off.
As for Silicon Graphics. did not even imagined of buying that. But I heard they were fantastic for graphics/animation work.
Regards
In those days I was in awe of Amiga Computers and Silicon Graphics computers. Amiga were comparatively expensive then PCs. But their operating system and hardware was ahead of its time. My friend used to do animation and titling of advertisements for Cable TVs on Amiga. PCs were coming with VESA bus architecture slots, which were expensive too. But it never took off.
As for Silicon Graphics. did not even imagined of buying that. But I heard they were fantastic for graphics/animation work.
Regards
Yes! and I'm sure it can only have been wired by hand! It's no wonder these things were so expensive!
Hiten, I bought an Amiga 1000 in 1987 and used it as my main computer through uni. I later got an Amiga 3000 second hand. I used to love programming 68K assembler on it. The amiga was so far ahead of it's time both hardware and OS wise. Fully pre-emptive multitasking in 512KB of ram!
I used a personal Iris at Uni in my computer graphics elective, it was nice. But I would say modern day GPU's far surpass the capabilities of even the $1,000,000 SGI machine in the 90's which they used to demo the Fighter Jet flying through canyons (real time graphics).
Amiga's were used a lot in TV studios in Australia as well with Genlocks, for putting real time video overlays and effects onto broadcasts. A lot of 1081 and 1084 Amiga Monitors were used as video monitors in TV studios as well.
Tony.
Hiten, I bought an Amiga 1000 in 1987 and used it as my main computer through uni. I later got an Amiga 3000 second hand. I used to love programming 68K assembler on it. The amiga was so far ahead of it's time both hardware and OS wise. Fully pre-emptive multitasking in 512KB of ram!
I used a personal Iris at Uni in my computer graphics elective, it was nice. But I would say modern day GPU's far surpass the capabilities of even the $1,000,000 SGI machine in the 90's which they used to demo the Fighter Jet flying through canyons (real time graphics).
Amiga's were used a lot in TV studios in Australia as well with Genlocks, for putting real time video overlays and effects onto broadcasts. A lot of 1081 and 1084 Amiga Monitors were used as video monitors in TV studios as well.
Tony.
When my 5+ year old Samsung Note 2 became too limited because 16 GB of memory isn't sufficient today, I decided that a new full feature Samsung was far beyond my budget. I began searching for a budget (under $200) smartphone that could do what I needed. I wound up with a $179 Motorola G5 plus. Let's just say that I don't miss the Samsung.....but one of my grandkids still uses it for games.
I was rather surprised at the quality of the pictures and video the Moto G5+ takes. It will do 1080 at 60Hz, and 4K at 30 Hz. I also downloaded a time lapse app for cool video effects. True slow motion requires a very fast sensor and a lot of processing horsepower.....and the battery to feed the DSP.
Note that this "Motorola" is not the same company that I worked at for 41 years. The phone group was sold to Lenovo.
In the late 70's I got upset with the politics at Motorola and quit. I went to work for Modcomp, the computer company making mainframes for NASA. The "boards" were 4 layer PCB's with power and ground routed. Wire wrap sockets were soldered in as were decoupling caps, and a few other parts. The individual wires for all the chips were wire wrapped by a machine that looked a lot like a modern SMD pick and place machine. It took about 2 days to wrap a board. Much of the common wiring was done on the machine, all in blue wire. The individualization of each board was hand wrapped in several colors, but red was reserved for repairs, reworks, and production changes.
I was learning the Modcomp V (5) also called the Modcomp Classic. It was a 16 bit machine that ran 4 X AMD 2901 4 bit slice processor chips at something like 25 MHz. They were used to control the space shuttle among other tasks. Any cheap phone today has far more processing power.
I was at Modcomp for about 3 months when an old boss from Motorola came to my house one evening and made me an offer I couldn't refuse......I went back to Mot, and stayed there for 35 more years. Modcomp couldn't compete with the likes of DEC and IBM, and got out of the hardware business completely, but still lives on in software and systems integration.
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