Conference 7.286::digital

    	I was answering so many questions in the affirmative that I got
    scared and had to stop! Boy, I've been doing this too long. I *AM* a
    nerd! I *AM* a nerd!
    	Brought back some funny memories...I had forgotten about whistling
    to 300 baud acoustic couplers and trying to make a carrier
    connection...

    The "have you ever patched a paper tape" really needs a follow-on of
    "have you ever _edited_ a paper tape?" and "have you ever edited a
    paper tape by patching holes back in?" (I can answer yes to both).

    Patching paper (or metal) tapes was an interesting experience. We
    started out by running the tape through and punching ALL of the holes,
    and then covering some up. This was counter-intutive to those folks who
    used to take one of those office supply paper punches and punch holes.
    (Out of aligmnet of course....)

    
    Back in the early 70s (not in Digital) I used to do the following:
    
    [1] repair a broken paper tape (in our office we had a tool to join the
    tape and remake the holes);
    
    [2] make small edits with the same tool;
    
    [3] edit a source tape by cutting away the wrong instructions and
    inserting the right ones;
    
    [4] patch binary tapes (only absolute, not relocatable ones -- sorry!)
    at a customer's site by assembling the patch, cutting away the last
    record of the original tape and the first record of the patch, and
    gluing them together (BTW, RSX11M's PAT program worked more or less
    with the same technique). Of course, the customer's system only had 24
    kb of core memory and a teletype, and I had to stop the application in
    order to assemble the patch -- and after that I had to reload the 24 kb
    program at 10 cps.
    
    Those were really great times!
    
    - Maurizio
    

>    with the same technique). Of course, the customer's system only had 24
>    kb of core memory and a teletype, and I had to stop the application in
>    order to assemble the patch -- and after that I had to reload the 24 kb
>    program at 10 cps.

The solution?  Write a cross assembler that ran on an IBM 360 and punched the
binary onto cards.  Write a boot loader for the PDP-11 card reader.

:-)

Burns

    I remember the tinker-toy paper tape winders that we used off the
    teletypes to keep the mess down.  Sure was fun when the rubber bands
    broke!

    And I remember somebody modifying one of those crank style paper tape
    winders to mechanically hit the single step button of the processor
    (Rice R-1 in this case).  To debug, you would watch the lights and
    crank until your program got to the interesting part.
    
    This was a software type, of course.  A hardware type would have done
    some circuit that electrically hit the signal instead. Probably would
    have taken much longer and not worked as well.  I did hear that they
    had to replace the pushbutton a few times as it wore out.
    
    Steveg

re: 2

>    The "have you ever patched a paper tape" really needs a follow-on of
>    "have you ever _edited_ a paper tape?" and "have you ever edited a
>    paper tape by patching holes back in?" (I can answer yes to both).

One of my favorite questions to ask the youngsters is "Do you know why
the DEL control character is at the top of the ASCII chart instead of at
the bottom with the other control characters?"

Of course the old teletypes labelled the key "Rubout" rather than
"Delete"...

-Hal

Took me a few second, but I figured it out.

This looks like the right place to post this.

PJDM


             Chris Stacy, Alan Wecsler, and Noel Chiappa

        This song is called "MIT's AI Lab". It's about MIT and the AI
Lab, but "MIT's AI Lab" is not the name of the lab, that's just the
name of the song. That's why I call the song "MIT's AI Lab."

        Now it all started two full dumps ago, on Thanksgiving, when
my friend and I went up to visit the hackers at AI lab on the ninth
floor. But the hackers don't always live on the ninth floor, they just
go there to use these complex order code stack machines they call Lisp
Machines.

        And using a special purpose processor like that, they got a lot
of room upstairs where DDT used to be, and havin' all that ROOM they
decided that they didn't have to collect any garbage for a long time.

        We JFCLed up here and found all the garbage in there and we
decided that it'd be a friendly gesture for us to take all the garbage
down to the system dump.

        So we took the half-a-meg of garbage, put it in the back of a
red ECL Multibus, took subrs and hacks and implementations of
defstruction, and headed on toward the system dump.

        Well, we got there and there was a big pop up window and a
write protect across the dump sayin', "This Garbage Collecter Under
Development on Thanksgiving," and we'd never heard of a garbage
collector NOP'd out on Thanksgiving before, and with tears in our eyes,
we CDR'd off into the sunset lookin' for another place to put the
garbage.

        We didn't find one 'til we came to a side area, and off the side
of the side area was three hundred megabyte disk, and in the middle of
the disk was another heap of garbage. And we decided that one big heap
was better than two little heaps, and rather than page that one in, we
decided to write ours out. That's what we did.

        Branched back to the Lisp Listener, had a Chinese Thanksgiving
dinner that couldn't be beat, went to SI:PROCESS-WAIT SLEEP, and didn't
get up until the next quantum, when we got a funcall from Mr.
Greenblatt.  He said, "Kid, we found your name on a cons at
the bottom of a half-a-meg of garbage and I just wanted to know if you
had any information about it".

        And I said, "Yes sir, Mr. Greenblatt, I cannot tell a lie. I
put that structure under that garbage." After speakin' to Greenblatt
for about forty-five million clock ticks on the telnet stream, we
finally arrived at the truth of the matter and he said that we had to
go down and link up the garbage, and also had to go down and speak to
him at the Lisp Machine Factory. So we got in the red ECL Multibus
with the subrs and hacks and implementations of defstruction and
headed on toward the Lisp Machine Factory.

        Now, friends, there was only one of two things that Greenblatt
could've done at the Lisp Machine Factory, and the first was that he
could've given us another 64K board for bein' so brave and honest on
BUG-LISPM (which wasn't very likely, and we didn't expect it), and the
other thing was that he could've flamed at us and told us never to be
seen BLTing garbage around in the vicinity again, which is what we
expected.

        But when we got to the Lisp Machine Factory, there was a
third COND-clause that we hadn't even counted upon, and we was both
immediately Process-Arrested, Deexposed, and I said, "Greenblatt, I
can't GC up the garbage with these here ARREST-REASONS on". He said:
"Output-Hold, kid, and get in the back of the Control CAR." ...And that's
what we did...sat in the back of the Control CAR, and drove to the
sharpsign quote open scene-of-the-crime close.

        I wanna tell you 'bout the town of Cambridge, Massachusetts,
where this is happenin'. They got seven hunnert stop signs, no turn on
red, and two campus police CARs, but when we got to the
sharpsign-quote-open scene-of-the-crime close, there was five Lisp
Machine hackers and three scope carts, bein' the biggest hack of the
last ten years and everybody wanted to get in the HUMAN-NETS story
about it.

        And they was usin' up all kinds of digital equipment that they
had hangin' around the Lisp Machine Factory. They was takin'
backtraces, stack traces, plastic wire wraps, blueprints, and microcode
loads...And they made seventeen 1K-by-32 pixel multi-flavored windows
with turds and arrows and a scroll bar on the side of each one with
documentation panes explainin' what each one was, to be used as
evidence against us.

....Took pictures of the labels, blinkers, the cursors, the pop up
notification windows, the upper right corner, the lower left corner
....and that's not to mention the XGP'd screen images!

        After the ordeal, we went back to the Factory. Greenblatt said he
was gonna locate us in a cell. He said: "Kid, I'm gonna INTERN you in a
cell. I want your manual and your mouse."

        I said, "Greenblatt, I can understand your wantin' my manual, so
I don't have any documentation about the cell, but what do you want my
mouse for?" and he said, "Kid, we don't want any window system problems". 
I said, "Greenblatt, did you think I was gonna deexpose myself for
litterin'?"

        Greenblatt said he was makin' sure, and, friends, Greenblatt
was, 'cause he took out the left Meta-key so I couldn't double bucky the
rubout and cold-boot, and he took out the Inspector so I couldn't
click-left on Modify, set the PROCESS-WARM-BOOT-ACTION on the window,
*THROW around the UNWIND-PROTECT and have an escape. Greenblatt was
makin' sure.

        It was about four or five hours later that Moon--(remember Moon?
This here's not a song about Moon)-- Moon came by and, with a few nasty
sends to Greenblatt on the side, bailed us out of core, and we went up
to the Loft, had another Chinese dinner that couldn't be beat, and
didn't get up until the next evening, when we all had to go to court.

        We walked in, sat down, Greenblatt came in with the seventeen
1K-by-32 pixel multi-flavored windows with turds and arrows and
documentation panes, sat down.

        McMahon came in, said, "All rise!" We all stood up, and
Greenblatt stood up with the seventeen 1K-by-32 pixel multi-flavored
windows with turds and arrows and documentation panes, and the judge
walked in, with an LA36, and he sat down. We sat down.

        Greenblatt looked at the LA36... then at the seventeen multi
flavored windows with the turds and arrows and documentation panes...
and looked at the LA36... and then at the seventeen 1K-by-32 pixel
multi-flavored windows with turds and arrows and documentation panes,
and began to cry.

        Because Greenblatt came to the realization that it was a typical
case of LCS state-of-the-art technology, and there wasn't nothin' he
could do about it, and the judge wasn't gonna look at the seventeen
1K-by-32 pixel multi-flavored windows with turds and arrows and
documentation panes, explainin' what each one was, to be used as
evidence against us.

        And we was fined fifty zorkmids and had to rebuild the world
load...in the snow.


        But that's not what I'm here to tell you about.
        I'm here to talk about the Lab.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
        They got a buildin' down in Cambridge called Technology Square,
where you walk in, you get your windows Inspected, detected, neglected
and Selected!

        I went down and got my interview one day, and I walked in, sat
down (slept on the beanbag in 926 the night before, so I looked and felt
my best when I went in that morning, 'cause I wanted to look like the
All-American High School Tourist from Sunnyvale. I wanted to feel like
.... I wanted to be the All-American Kid from Sunnyvale), and I walked in,
sat down, I was gunned down, brung down, locked out and all kinds of
mean, nasty, ugly things.

        And I walked in, I sat down, KAREN gave me a piece of paper that
said: "Kid, see the CLU hackers on XX."

        I went up there, I said, "Eliot, I wanna lose. I wanna lose!
I wanna see hacks and kludges and unbound variables and cruft in my
code! Eat dead power supplies with cables between my teeth! I mean
lose! lose! lose!"

        And I started jumpin' up and down, yellin' "LOSE! LOSE! LOSE!"
and Stallman walked in and started jumpin' up and down with me, and we
was both jumpin' up and down, yellin', "LOSE! LOSE! LOSE! LOSE!!" and
some professor came over, gave me a 6-3 degree, sent me down the hall,
said "You're our distinguished lecturer." Didn't feel too good about it.

        Proceeded down the infinite corridor, gettin' more inspections,
rejections (this IS MIT), detections, neglections, and all kinds of
stuff that they was doin' to me there, and I was there for
two years... three years... four years... I was there for a long
time goin' through all kinds of mean, nasty, kludgy things, and I was
havin' a tough time there, and they was inspectin', injectin', every
single part of me, and they was leavin' no part unbound!

----------------------------------------------------------------------

        Proceeded through, and I finally came to see the very last man.
I walked in, sat down, after a whole big thing there. I walked up, and
he said, "Kid, we only got one question: Have you ever been arrested"?

        And I proceeded to tell him the story of the half-a-meg of garbage
with full orchestration and five-part harmony and stuff like that, and
other phenomenon.

        He stopped me right there and said, "Kid, have you ever been to
court"? And I proceeded to tell him the story of the seventeen
1K-by-32 pixel multi-flavored windows with turds and arrows and
documentation panes... 

        He stopped me right there and said, "Kid, I want you to go over
and sit down on that bench that says 'LISP Machine Group'... NOW, KID!"

        And I walked over to the bench there, and there's... The LISP
Machine Group is where they put you if you may not be moral enough to
join Symbolics after creatin' your special form.

        There was all kinds of mean, nasty, ugly-lookin' people on the
bench there ... there was Microcoders, DPL hackers, File System
hackers, and Window System HAckers!! Window System hacker sittin'
right there on the bench next to me! And the meanest, ugliest,
nastiest one... the kludgiest Window System hacker of them all... was
comin' over to me, and he was mean and ugly and nasty and horrible and
all kinds of things, and he sat down next to me. He said, "Kid, you
get a new copy of the sources?" I said, "I didn't get nothin'. I had
to rebuild the world load."

        He said, "What were you arrested for, kid?" and I said,
"Littering..." And they all moved away from me on the bench there,
with the hairy eyeball and all kinds of mean, nasty things, 'til I
said, "And making gratuitous modifications to LMIO; sources..." And
they all came back, shook my hand, and we had a great time on the
bench talkin' about microcoding, DPL designing, file-system hacking,
.... and all kinds of groovy things that we was talkin' about on the
bench, and everything was fine.

        We was drinking Coke smoking all kinds of things, until the RA
came over, had some paper in his hand, held it up and said:

"KIDS-THIS-EXAM-S-GOT-FOURTY
SEVEN-WORDS-THIRTY-SEVEN-MULTIPLE-CHOICE-QUESTIONS
FIFTY-EIGHT-WORDS-WE-WANT-TO-KNOW-THE-DETAILS
OF-THE-HACK-THE-TIME-OF-THE-HACK-AND-ANY
OTHER-KIND-OF-THING-YOU-GOT-TO-SAY
PERTAINING-TO-AND-ABOUT-THE-HACK-ANY-OTHER
KIND-OF-THING-YOU-GOT-TO-SAY-WE-WANT-TO-KNOW-THE-ARRESTED-PROCESS'-NAME-AND-ANY
OTHER-KIND-OF-THING..."

And he talked for forty-five minutes and nobody understood a word that
he said. But we had fun rolling the mice around and clickin' on the
buttons.

        I filled out the special form with the four-level macro defining
macros.  Typed it in there just like it was and everything was fine.
And I put down my keyboard, and I switched buffers, and there ...  in
the other buffer...  centered in the other buffer...  away from
everything else in the buffer... in parentheses, capital letters,
backquotated, in 43VXMS, read the following words: "Kid, have you
featurized yourself"?

        I went over to the RA. Said, "Mister, you got a lot of damned
gall to ask me if I've featurized myself!  I mean, I mean, I mean
that you send, I'm sittin' here on the bench, I mean I'm sittin' here on
the Lisp Machine Group bench, 'cause you want to know if I'm losing
enough to join the Lab, burn PROMs, power supplies, and documentation,
after bein' on SF-LOVERS?"

----------------------------------------------------------------------
        He looked at me and said, "Kid, we don't like your kind!  We're
gonna send your user-id off to the DCA in Washington"!  And, friends,
somewhere in Washington, enshrined on some little floppy disk, is a
study in ones and zeros of my brain-damaged programming style...
----------------------------------------------------------------------

        And the only reason I'm singin' you the song now is 'cause you
may know somebody in a similar situation. Or you may be in a similar
situation, and if you're in a situation like that, there's only one
thing you can do:

[ CHORUS ]

        You  know, if one person, just one person, does it, they may
think he's really dangerous and they won't take him.

        And if two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're
both LISP hackers and they won't take either of them.

        And if three people do it!  Can you imagine three people
walkin' in, singin' a bar of "MIT's AI Lab" and walkin' out? They may
think it's an re-implementation of the window system!

        And can you imagine fifty people a day? I said FIFTY people a
day, walkin' in, singin' a bar of "MIT's AI Lab" and walkin' out?
Friends, they may think it's a MOVEMENT, and that's what it is: THE
MIT AI LAB ANTI-LOSSAGE MOVEMENT! And all you gotta do to join is to
sing it the next time it comes around on the circular buffer.

        With feelin'.

You can hack anything you want
on MIT Lisp Machines
You can hack anything you want
on MIT Lisp Machines
Walk right in and begin to hack
Just push your stuff right onto the stack
You can hack anything you want
on MIT Lisp Machines

(but dont forget to fix the bug...on MIT Lisp Machines!)

In my paper archives I still keep a yellowish copy of the following "Unix 
Hierarchy", written by Gene Spafford, printed on a teletype-like, upper-case 
only device. 

Enjoy.

-------- original text starts -------------

People who come into contact with the Unix system are often told: "If you 
have trouble, see so-and-so, he's a guru," or "Bob there is a real Unix 
hacker." Often, they are baffled by these appellations, and do not pursue the 
matter further.

What is a "Unix hacker?" how does he differ from a "guru"?

To answer these and other questions, I present a draft of the 'Unix 
Hierarchy':

beginner - insecure with the concept of a terminal
  - has yet to learn the basics of vi
  - has not figured out how to get a directory listing
  - still has trouble with typing <return> after each line of input

novice - knows that 'ls' will produce a directory listing
  - uses the editor, but calls it 'vye'
  - has heard of C but never used it
  - has had his first bad experience with 'rm'
  - is wondering how to read his mail
  - is wondering why the person next to him seems to like Unix so very much

user - uses 'vi' and 'nroff', but inexpertly
  - has heard of regular expressions, but never seen one
  - has figured out that '-' precedes options
  - has attempted to write a C program and has decided to stick with Pascal
  - is wondering how to move a directory
  - thinks that dbx is a brand of stereo component
  - knows how to read his mail and is wondering how to read the news

knowledgable user - uses nroff with no trouble and is beginning to learn tbl 
    and eqn
  - uses grep to search for fixed strings
  - has figured out that mv(1) will move directories
  - has learned that 'learn' doesn't help
  - somebody has shown him how to write C programs
  - once used sed to do some text substitution
  - has seen dbx used but does not use it himself
  - thinks that make is only for wimps

expert - uses sed when necessary
  - uses macros in vi, uses ex when necessary
  - posts news at every possible opportunity
  - writes csh scripts occassionally
  - write C programs using vi and compile with cc
  - uses 'adb' because he doesn't trust source debuggers
  - can answer questions about the user environment
  - writes his own nroff macros to supplement std. ones
  - write scripts for Bourne shell (/bin/sh)
  - knows how to install bug fixes

guru - uses m4 and lex with comfort
  - writes assembly code with 'cat >'
  - uses adb on the kernel while system is loaded
  - customizes utilities by patching the source
  - reads device driver source with his breakfast
  - can answer any Unix question after a little thought
  - uses 'make' for anything that requires two or more distinct commands
  - has learned how to breach security, but no longer needs to try

wizard - writes device drivers with 'cat >'
  - fixes bugs by patching the binaries
  - can answer any question before you ask
  - writes his own troff macro packages
  - is on first-name basis with Dennis, Bill, and Ken

    
    Really miss the days of greasing up the 'ol ASR33 Teletype when the
    key's started to jam.  Is there a 20ma loop PCI option card out there ?
     

    In Westfield, before the LA36 came along, we used to just lower them,
    via a chain falls, into a bath of CFC's and turn on  the ultrasonic
    vibrator.
    
    There used to be a joke that the inventor of the ASR33 went insane.
    
    

    The yes answers to half of those questions require that you have been
    around for awile when technology like paper tape was the only 
    alternative to punched cards.
                                                                 
    That does not make you a nerd....It means you are old..

    Anyone else remember Model 14s, 15s, and 19s? Good ol' 45 baud 5-level
    code.

> Anyone else remember Model 14s, 15s, and 19s? Good ol' 45 baud 5-level
> code.

  Only from pictures. :-)

  Her are a few more potential questions for the test:

    - (T/F) "Stunt box" refers to an athletic activity.

    - (T/F) "Chad" is just a boy's name.

    - You know where to find the actual "bit bucket".

    - (T/F) The "G Bell" key was named after an early computer pioneer.

    - You still say <Enq> while everyone else says <^E>.
    - Extra credit: You still say <DC1> through <DC3> too.

    - You know what tabs to break off on the "Here is" drum.

                                   Atlant

    Did anybody notice that the test in .0 had no empty lines?
    
    (How did I know that? How did I see that the "blank" lines were really
    lines with a single space? You don't really want to know. Only nerds
    would care to distinguish between empty, space(s), and tab(s).)
    
    Does anyone know what having no empty lines means about a file?
    
    (I do...)
    
    /s/ MarkB

    remember decoding magnetic tape by eye? we had a bottle of some
    solution you spread on with a cotton swab, then all the bits stood out
    nice and clear.
    
    used this on early DECtapes, and on 'mag stripe ledger cards' at
    Burroughs.
    
    also had a programmers toolkit at Burroughs with a rivet hammer and
    staking tool. All the primary calls of a program started from a
    mechanical pin array.
    
    Yes, getting old...... 

> remember decoding magnetic tape by eye? we had a bottle of some
> solution you spread on with a cotton swab, then all the bits stood out
> nice and clear.

  "Magna-See" was one tradename.

                                   Atlant

    Does anyone know where a current version of the Hacker's Test can be
    found?

I still have some "Magna-See". I have used it as follows...

I made up a demo, some time ago, that has the following media with the 
"Magna-See" on it so you could see how the data is actual written on the
media.

Each item is enclosed in pelxaglass baseball card sandwich display.  

Apple ][ DOS, ProDos 8"  and 5 1/4" and 3.5", Data Cassette
Apple ]I[ DOS, ProDos 3.5"
Macintosh 3.5" low and High density
IBM 8" 5 1/4" and 3.5" in His and low density
Reel to Reel audio
Cassette (Audio)
Video (Beta) 1.5 and 3 hour format
VHS 2, 4 and 6 hour
8 Track Audio
TU58
TS05
TE16
TU78
4mm DAT
8mm DAT

Makes for some interesting conversations. 

	Efw

>    In Westfield, before the LA36 came along, we used to just lower them,
>    via a chain falls, into a bath of CFC's and turn on  the ultrasonic
>    vibrator.

AH, YES!  I shared the same wire cage with Gary Zamberletti and his 
Teletype ultrasonic cleaner.  (I ran the line printer refurb at the other 
end of the cage)  That cleaner found it's way to the Lowell Product Repair 
Center around 1979 or 1980 and I lost track of it after that.

We used to dunk 8e memory stacks into it to clean the accumulated concrete 
dust out of the cores.  We NEVER lost a memory stack and we brought a few 
intermittent ones back to life that way.

I remember cleaning someone's motorcycle clutch plates in there once.

    You mean those stupid bronze Norton plates that couldn't hold a Combat
    Engine tied down to the drivetrain?
    
    hello from another (stealth) oldtimer.
    

    regarding .12 
    the designer of the teletype did'nt went insane...
    he was insane at the beginning

    G'day,
    
     5 hole tape.. yessir! My Ferranti Pegasus read tape in and punched
    tape out for a teletype to read an put on paper...
    
    Mercury delay lines and light emitting transistors (valves to you sir)
    
    And a clock - my first computer had a clock - it was electric and on
    the front so you see when it was the next person's go...
    
    and we had a small device thatt sort looked like a peice of lcd 'cept
    you placed it on mag tape and you could see the patterns...
    
    and a mag tape splice too and if you misloaded the drive, the left
    drive went clockwise and th eright spool went anti clockwise and the
    tape became much longer and narrower very quickly....
    
    And it had round green scopes so you could dial up any accumulator or
    memory block and see the 39 bit words....
    
    and can I remember the op codes in m/c code unfortunately yes (most of
    them anyway!
    
    And I used CLEO on a Leo III - invented for the lyons tea house!
    
    and who commented about nerd vs old...       yes I feel old today!
    
    
    dere
    

dere:

> and a mag tape splice too and if you misloaded the drive, the left
> drive went clockwise and th eright spool went anti clockwise and the
> tape became much longer and narrower very quickly....

  You had TS04's way back then? Wow! :-)

                                   Atlant

  Aw c'mon! Somebody tell us a Williams Tube story now! Or even
  a good "core" story!
                                   Atlant

You guys had paper tape?  We had plugboards! :-)

			Steve

    You want a good core story - I am one of the dinasoars who worked on
    the U.S. Air Force SAGE system in the late 50's and 60's.  These were
    ENORMOUS (well, at least quite large) systems physically (55,000 or so
    vacuum tubes per site) with two central processing units.  Each unit
    (or "side" as in A Side and B Side) had a 10K small memory and a 100K
    large memory. Each core plane in the large memory was approximately 3
    ft X 3 ft and the stack (36 bit word) was about 4 ft high.  When I
    originally "joined" the program, we tuned the drivelines with a
    standing wave (SWR) meter - later on there was a program written which
    allowed this to be done via sound broadcast over a PA system. The reason
    for this was that the huge current pulses required to drive the select and
    inhibit lines (supplied by @10" bottle tube drivers) could get so big
    they would burn out the wires if the "transmission line" was operating
    ineffectively. And in the end, there wasn't even enough memory to load
    and run MS-DOS.
    
    	Bill
        
    
    

re .-1

>    ineffectively. And in the end, there wasn't even enough memory to load
>    and run MS-DOS.
>    
>    	Bill

Yeah, but we didn't need all that expensive core 'cause we had those 
magnificent drums. Another wonder of 50's engineering...

tim m.
(another trained SAGE guy - and starting to feel really old)

    I remember the first graphical display. An etch-a-sketch and two
    stepper motors ...

  Somehow, I think Paul is joking, especially based on the fact
  that he didn't describe any erase mechanism. (Kinda like
  Dilbert's boss's Etch-A-Sketch, no?)

  But the early graphical hard-copy stuff wasn't far from what
  Paul describes. I spent a lot of time working on the systems
  that RCA Solid State used to design their CMOS ICs (in the
  days when the COSMAC was just a gleam in people's eyes).

  The interactive graphical output was a semi-custom (CSS)
  controller (KV8I or KV8E) driving a Tektronix 611 Bistable
  Direct View Storage Scope. This was a sort of prehistoric
  pre-cursor to the "Mean Green Flashing Machine" Tektronix
  terminals (411, 4010? etc.) that later became famous.

  The hard-copy graphical output was a large (3' by 4', E-sized)
  plotter that used two stepping motors and had, essentially, ten
  commands. Move {N,S,E,W,NE,SE,SW,NW}, Pen-up, and Pen-down. It
  was a lot of fun to watch it plot but it sure was noisy and slow.
  The DEC/X-8 module for the plotter doodled an endless, space-
  filling curve that I think falls into the general category of
  "Sierpinski" patterns, the 1970s rage that preceded Mandlebrot
  plots. :-)

  The back-up for the 256Kword RF08/RS08 fixed-head disk system
  was a tape drive whose name I've forgotten but it was based on
  an *8-TRACK AUDIO CARTRIDGE*! Sheesh! It worked, except that one
  of the DEC techs, during PMs, would routinely forget to back up
  the customer's data from the fixed disk before running diagnostics.
  His visits quickly became known as "Pre-Mortems". No, it wasn't ME!

                                   Atlant

re: .31

Perhaps you mean the TU58?  Which itself evokes CAPS-11...

Ray

Re .32

The 8-track cartridge thing was called a CartriFile, or something like
that.  The nice (?) thing about these cartridges is that the tape only
moves in one direction -- you never need to rewind, but it takes a long
time if you pass the data you needed.  It makes my head hurt to think
about the mechanical design inside the cartridge.

TU58 uses a very cute, reliable, mechanical design.  Its kludges were
all in the choice of interface.  (If you don't know, you'll never guess.)

re Note 4586.33 by WIBBIN::NOYCE:

> TU58 uses a very cute, reliable, mechanical design.  Its kludges were
> all in the choice of interface.  (If you don't know, you'll never guess.)

        Was that the "radial serial" interface?

        Bob

> > TU58 uses a very cute, reliable, mechanical design.  Its kludges were
> > all in the choice of interface.  (If you don't know, you'll never guess.)
> 
> Was that the "radial serial" interface?

  Yes! I actually programmed one once! Yipes! And booting RT11
  and trying to macro-asemble something was truly the experience
  of a lifetime! :-)

  But in the other note, I actually meant the TS04/TS11, known
  to its victims as "The Tape Stretcher 11".

                                   Atlant

>Perhaps you mean the TU58?  Which itself evokes CAPS-11...


did we miss Harry Drabb's famous TU56?

Speaking of chad, didja ever wonder what it'd look like if you taped the 
end of an ASR33 paper roll spool (dem red plastic spools that the paper 
roll was slipped onto) to an air nozzle (pre-OSHA) then filled the tube 
with chad and fired it off at an unsuspecting passer-by?

Usta have this weighted "hammer" arrangement that'd fall on the air line 
nozzle, thereby whacking it open at an alarming rate, thus distributing 
chad EVERYWHERE.

Trip wires were put in the most inconspicuous places.

Gotta be careful with that stuff, though.  Guys'd take it to weddings and 
ruin thousand-dollar gowns.  The oil'd permanently stain clothing if the 
chad wasn't removed.

Many a groom wound up dismantling a dashboard to clean out the defroster 
ducts, too.

Ah, wonderful stuff, that chad.

In one of my "memories" boxes I have a Shillito's bill (back when the 
department stores and such sent your bills on 80-col Hollerith cards) 
with a piece of red, card-correction tape on it.

RE the Etch-A-Sketch and two stepper motors ... only half a joke. I remember 
just that hack on the cover of one the hobbyists' magazines 'back in the 70s 
(maybe Popular Electronics). A real Etch-A-Sketch, two stepper motors, connected 
to something (maybe an Altair). In the picture, it showed a very nice sinusoid 
wave, perfectly smooth (try *that* by hand) plus x and y axes. I always thought 
it was the height of something or other.

Erasure would be a problem...

    How about HydraMatic's original CoreNet?
    
    When a data file was needed at the other end of the Willow Run plant,
    they find a a guy with Nikes and, you guessed it, pop out the core and
    send him on a 'run'.
    
    If he was a track star you could even get up to 4k baud (less then a
    100meters) xfer rate....  :>)
    
    

    G'day,
    
     I can remember  using a Hollerith card sorter to verify my program
    output!... If they tallied, then all was deemed bug free and the
    program was run!
    
    
  One one occasion, we rigged a speaker to the read head of a MT drive. The
    program was a simulation of a slow moving truck (represented by a
    stationary bit) and a faster cars (=bits entering and passing) and cars
    going the other way (=bits entering ls end and moving up the word).
    
    If a bit tried to pass the truck and there was insufficient spare . bits
    to get past, there was a collision.. we started the tape drive and the
    speaker gave out a screech and the message "You really must be careful
    when trying to overtake!"  It then rewound and we restarted the
    program. The output of the word bit pattern was shown on a TV linked to
    one of the CRTs (real ones , round and green)
    
    derek
    
    Anyone work in a place where the computer was a cardboard box? I worked
    for teh SW Gas board in the UK. We put everything into a cardboard box
    and a man took it away. Sometime later, he'd bring it back with teh
    listing or whatever...

    TU58 drives and cartridge live on, they're just called DC2120s. HP, 
    3M, and others make money out of them (though they do hold rather more
    than they used to).
    
    What's wrong with the Radial Serial Protocol, then ? (Don't answer
    that, it's just an excuse for me to say...) In my customer days doing
    custom ATE, I had RT11clusters working, using an RT11 host with a
    RSP-host-faker and multiple RT11 "satellites" with no real storage at
    all, booting via their serial lines. A bit of code on the host listened
    to a DZ for RSP requests and replied with data from RT11 virtual disks.
    Look, no TU58 seek times (but it's still dirt cheap)! 
    
    regards
    john

    My first job was at ITT World Communications in NYC.  There were still
    some ADX-7300 (PDP-1 based) systems there, but I didn't do anything
    with them.  My department had PDP-9s, and was just installing the first
    PDP-15s.
    
    In the Telex Engineering department we had LOTS of paper tape, lots of
    teletypes (though many had been replaced with small thermal head
    printers that made a lot less noise and took less space),
    reperferators, and so on.  Not all paper tape was oiled, by the way.  I
    eventually wrote a program that would read PDP-9/15 paper tape on a
    PDP-11/70 (field service nearly had a fit when they saw a paper-tape
    unit on an 11/70) and disassemble programs.
    
    We also had lots of TU55 and TU56 drives.  I know of some that were
    more than 10 years old by the time I left, and I also know of some
    reels of tape that had been in use for 10 years and still worked. 
    Maybe they weren't very compact, but they were reliable.  The TU58 was
    a big dissapointment when I ran into one for the first time on an
    11/730 and later on an 11/750.  (Ever boot stand-alone backup from
    TU58s?).
    
    We also had all the peripherals you would expect, including Vermont
    Research Drums on the PDP-9s.  Some of those were in use for more than
    10 years as well.  On the PDP-15s we had RS09s, but eventually replaced
    them with Disk Emulators from Imperial Technology that used big core
    boards.  Imperial recommended semiconductor memory, but people there
    were used to having computers that didn't lose what was in memory when
    the power was shut off, even though we had a UPS system that
    successfully survived several major blackouts.

  There's one of those "new, improved!" TU58's on my Macintosh.
  Only it's called a "QIC-WIDE Serpentine-recording" tape drive and
  instead of storing 256KB (?), it stores 4 GB. (only 16,384 times
  more data :-) ). And it can store and verify all that data in
  about the same time it took to macroassemble one program using
  that poor old TU58 as mass storage.

  (Motto: "The USR is *ALWAYS* at the other end of the tape.")

  TU56's were lots of fun, too. Much more fun than TU58s.

  My first bit of real programming on a DEC system was to take
  the Star Trek program that was handed around for OS/8 (and
  written in OS/8 BASIC) and modify it so it only required one
  of the overlay libraries. This allowed everyone in my class
  of Junior Field Service Techs to run from *ONE* DECtape.
  Just boot it up, load STar Trek, and move the DECtape to
  the next machine.

  (Prior to my mods, the program was constantly swapping
  overlays, so the DECtape needed to remain mounted on the
  machine. Also, the constant swapping of overlays really
  bogged down the blasting of Klingons.)

  This earned me the reputation as being "the software guy"
  in Earl Caine's (?) PDP-8 processor class.

  Another neat DECtape trick was to run DEC/X-8 and *REMOVE*
  the spinning DECtape from the drive. DEC/X-8 kept right on
  running with narry a complaint. That must have been some
  exhaustive data test, huh?

  And then there was the slight problem that would develop
  with TU56 hubs over the years.

    "Did you *SEE* that?"

    "What?"

    "That little bitty reel of tape that just went whizzing
    down the hallway! See, it left that trail of 3/4" tape..."

    "Oh, that..."

                                   Atlant

  What do you mean it's tough to express yourself in 8.3 characters?

  *REAL* programmers can do it in 6.2! And it's rumored that some
  wizards could do it in 5.something!

                                   Atlant

    whats so strange about computer etch-a-sketch? Im building one right
    now, to drive a router to cut boat parts. 3 step motors, all off a printer
    port of an old 386. 
    
    Had an offer the other night for some old RL02's. Turns out the
    aluminum is excellent for remelting and making your own castings.
    
    I have an RP02 drive motor on my shaper, and a KL10 blower as my shop
    vent. 

...did someone say COSMAC?  (getting off the Digital track for a second..)
Anyone else have a Netronic's COSMAC ELF microcomputer system, too?
Neat little 8-bit microprocessor - any of the 16 registers could be the PC.
I splurged and got eventually 2 4K memory boards, audio-tape-based TinyBASIC, 
the assembler, the video card.  Built my own driver-ports and 4 digit 7-segment
display.   Back then,  for me it was either the Netronic's system, or the 
IMSA 8080 systems, and the IMSA systems cost more than twice as much as the 
COSMAC motherboard.

 - Josh

    Anybody remember the wall displays in certain defence establishments
    that consisted of a VDU (tiny by todays standards) that was being
    filmed (yup filmed) by a 35mm movie camera, film was immediately
    developed and then projected onto the wall!
    
    I am led to believe that this type of equipment was also used in
    certain military aircraft of the same period??
    
    Gerald

This note is beginnig to look like it belongs in

	MILORD::WAR_STORY

    While in the Navy we has ASRs that were classified info and
    unclassified.
    
    Classified tape was one color and unclassified was another.
    
    When someone fresh to the fleet came on board you would mix some of the 
    two colors of chad. Then you gave them the box and told them that you
    had to sort the classified and unclassified chad out. You see the
    classified chad had to be burned to keep all the secrets!
    
    Another FISH along the ASR lines was to take a roll of 3 ply paper,
    this was one sheet of paper one sheet of carbon paper and another
    sheet of paper.  Unroll about the first 2 feet and tear off the bottom
    sheet of paper and reroll it. Now give it the the fresh meat and tell
    him that due to a paper shortage they needed to unroll the whole thing
    and place the carbon in between the paper sheets.
    
    Efw

    re .50 and "New Meat" 
    
    We had a deal going with the Bosun's Mate's that when they got a "new
    guy", they'd send him up to IOIC to "empty the bit bucket", and we'd
    send our new guys down there to get 50' of water-line.
    
    Ah yes, the good old days...
    
    .mike.

    Re .50 and .51:
      In the Air Force it was 2 cans of grid leak bias and a roll of
    flight line.
    
    Jim Morton

    And in manufacturing it was down to the tool store for, first a long
    weight (wait), then a left handed screww driver, and finally a rubber
    hammer.  When they wouldn't go the third time you'd go yourself then
    show them they do exist.

      And from WAR_STORY, where much of this topic belongs, comes the
    hospital where they sent student nurses to the next ward to fetch 'a
    yard of Fallopian tube'. The next ward, of course, said they'd run out
    and sent them somewhere else. The students spent a couple of hours
    getting a tour of the hospital, with a lesson in elementary human
    biology thrown in free.
    
    Ken

    
    I don't know whether .50 was kidding, but at the National Security
    Agency chad from the card punch really was classified top secret and
    had to be burned.
    
    And we told NUGs (new useless guys) that the bits of chad had to be
    sorted into separate burn bags by number: "Be sure to separate the
    nines from the sixes so that the data can't be reconstructed from the
    classified ash."
    
    JP

>    Another FISH along the ASR lines was to take a roll of 3 ply paper,
>    this was one sheet of paper one sheet of carbon paper and another
>    sheet of paper.  Unroll about the first 2 feet and tear off the bottom
>    sheet of paper and reroll it. Now give it the the fresh meat and tell
>    him that due to a paper shortage they needed to unroll the whole thing
>    and place the carbon in between the paper sheets.

	Hah!! :-)
	I still remember the first time I walked into the Ops bldg and
	saw someone unrolling paper down the hall to "fix it".
	I got the 'assignment' the following week, but I knew what the
	fix was.
	
	And, I recall the hours I spent in the burn room feeding paper
	into the fire. Then sifting the ash for un burned bits. :-/
	
	Jay

re .55

I was also with No Such Agency.
We had to burn ALL chad no matter the color.

Use to send NUGs out for relative bearing Grease, a Bucket of Prop Wash,
or a Gu-11  (Gull), or to check the b1rd (BIRD) filter on the antennas.

Efw

speaking of chad, my roommate and I once got into an argument around how many
pieces there were in a handful.  having the larger hands, I grabbed as big a
bunch as possible and dumped it on a desk.  we very quickly decided that we
needed to subdivide it into smaller units if we were to ever have any hope of
estimating the number without going insane.

as I recall, our estimate came out to something like 170K little pieces!  even
if we were off by a factor of 2, that's still close to 100K, much much more than
I would have ever guessed.

-mark

Mark:

  You could have just punched out a few (hundred) of those
  "lace cards"; then you would have had a very definite
  number of chad (what's the singular?) and could have
  measured its nominal volume. :-)

  Oh, and you'd also have a very angry person_in_charge_of_
 'O29_maintenance, more-than-likely.

                                   Atlant

>  You could have just punched out a few (hundred) of those
>  "lace cards"; then you would have had a very definite
>  number of chad (what's the singular?) and could have
>  measured its nominal volume. :-)

actually as I was writing that note I realized that the BEST way to do this
would have been to weigh a few hundred pieces to the nearest 10,000th of a gram
with one of the analytical balances in the chem lab, then weigh the whole
pile and do the math.  those balances are VERY accurate.  I remember weighing
my name on them by first weighing a piece of paper, writing my name on it and
weighing it again!

>  Oh, and you'd also have a very angry person_in_charge_of_
> 'O29_maintenance, more-than-likely.

I'm not sure I follow.  But speaking on the 029, do you remember the 026?  They
did NOT punch the same codes and you had to be sure your entire card deck was
punched on the same version of key punch.  There was even a special card you
had to punch to tell the computer if the deck that followed was punched on an
026.  It turned out the codes for that particular card read the same independent
of which machine it was punched on.

-mark

    Ah yes...the 029...you did NOT have to wait for it to warm up when you
    turned it on...unlike the 026 !  ....as I sit here looking for the part
    number on the "026 program drum"....ah yes...310261...now I can put it
    back on the shelf next to the 077 plug board.
    
    George...who worked on DEC's first EDP conversion...from tab cards to
             a Burrough's B300 computer (the PDP5 I/O devices could not
             handle the load)...
    
    and yes, the program drum has the old tab cards...the ones with three
    square corners...not the modern rounded corner tab cards!
    

    In the army radio shop, the noobies got sent to the tool crib for
    matched pairs of fallopian tubes for the transmitter, fifty feet of
    bunker line, left hand metric pliers, and gallon cans of prop wash.
    
    Then there was the elusive megacycle to megahertz converter...

    This weekend the Charles River Museum of Industry is having an
    Innovaton Expo. Ken Olsen was the keynote speaker at the kickoff
    reception last night. His new company has a major exhibit, and a long
    table full of KO treasures.- a jar of cores, a PDP-1, PDP-8 and PDP11
    front pannel, lots of old DEC modules, some old disks and head
    steppers. 
    
    Nice place to visit, any time, the Expo is Today, Saturday and Sunday.
    150 Moody St. Waltham MA.

> George...who worked on DEC's first EDP conversion...

  The mind boggles at the possible replies...

                                   Atlant

> >  Oh, and you'd also have a very angry person_in_charge_of_
> > 'O29_maintenance, more-than-likely.
> 
> I'm not sure I follow.

  Weren't "lace cards" somewhat more susceptible to jamming in
  the works, especially when you were running them on auto-dup?
  The structure of the card was pretty weak once all those bits
  were punched out.

  At least, I seem to remember the operators where I was not
  taking too kindly to stupid card punch tricks.


> But speaking on the 029, do you remember the 026?

  I've seen an '026, but no, I don't think I *EVER* had the
  pleasure of working on one. I actually liked the '029, though,
  except for the non-Teletype (TM) keyboard layout. The '029 had
  a very satisfying feel and sound as it punched the cards.

                                   Atlant

    I wrote a lot of BAL for a 360 using both an 026 and an 029.  Had my
    own program cards to get the labels, opcodes, arguments and comments
    all aligned very nicely.
    
    Amazing how time flies.
    

>    Anybody remember the wall displays in certain defence establishments
>    that consisted of a VDU (tiny by todays standards) that was being
>    filmed (yup filmed) by a 35mm movie camera, film was immediately
>    developed and then projected onto the wall!

    This was in the Data Display Central (DDC) portion of the USAF 465L
    system. It was called a quadrajector. We had four of them in the SAC
    underground command post. There were three other sites to provide for some
    survivalbility (We weren't high on the list to survive).

    When a controller requested some information to be displayed on the
    16-foot square screens, the data would be routed to a 3-foot long
    charactron tube, where the electron beam would be extruded by a character
    mask into the desired character. When the character hit the front of the
    tube, the resulting light exposed the 70mm negative film. A motor then
    pulled the film past teflon chambers containing developer, fixer, and
    rinse. An arm then moved the 70mm positive film into position and a 1.2KV UV
    buld flashed, transferring the image from the negative to the positive
    film. A hot metal plate was then pushed into the positive film to develop
    the image.  The film then moved to the projection station where a 2.2KW
    xenon bulb sent the image to the screen. There were two negative
    processing systems and four positive projecting stations per quadrajector.
    One station covered 1/4 (8x8 feet) of the screen. With four quads (16
    projection stations), you could put up some pretty impressive displays.

    Even with the data coming from other sites across the U.S., the elapsed
    time from the request until it was flashed on the screen, was 13 seconds
    - all this using 1950/60's technology.

    Terry

Dilbert told his manager last week that his token ring network wan't working 
because the token had fallen out under his desk.

PJDM

    Yeah, but it is hiding in the ethernet somewhere.  I am waiting for
    dilbert to teach the boss about Avian transport.  Should be interesting
    to see a pigeon coop on the back of the etch a sketch.  
    
    meg

    
    	I was ROLLING when I saw that strip ... as a matter of fact, I
    	had to hang it up on the outside of my wall.
    

    Re: .67 - the slightly older version was the PRRE (Photographic
    Recording and Reproduction Element) of SAGE fame - performed the same
    function at DC and full CC sites - RCC's didn't use them.  As I
    remember, the PRRE (there were some less PC "acromyms" applied at the
    time) was a 5 or 6 inch high definition display tube with a 35 mm
    photographic recorder and projector attached to it.  At the time, it
    took and developed pictures faster than a Polaroid process camera.
    
    	Bill
     

  Was Eidiphor or the GE Light-Gate technology used anywhere in
  the military applicatuions?

                                   Atlant

I was rather disturbed to find I got 0X144 on the Hacker's Test - after all, 
I'm only 27!

Chris.

    Atlant,

    We had an Eidiphor installed for testing purposes in the SAC command
    post. It worked well for football games and other action displays, but
    when it came to data the quads couldn't be beat. The thin oil film used in
    the Eidiphor tended to make the text displays appear to swim, a feature
    not noticed when action is being displayed. I seem to remember some
    reliability issues too. In the end, they removed the Eidiphor.

    Terry

	... I worked on a prototype Eidiphor using a CDC 1800(?) to simulate
war room displays.  I got to be pretty good at converging that beast over a 60'
projection throw when the union techs had all gone home for the day! One of the
big colonels at RADC had a son playing pro ball for the Cowboys, so you can bet
we had it up for him a few Sunday afternoons!

	Gawd, that was a loooong time ago!  :>)