[cctalk] Re: Waaaay OT: Re: Re: Classic computing - earliest years

On Sat, 2025-10-18 at 09:31 +0100, David Wade via cctalk wrote: We had a 7094 II in my building at JPL in 1967 that had the oil-cooled core. They turned it off for Christmas. It never worked again. They found that bits of solder had been suspended in the oil, and when it was turned off they settled in little piles on the connections in the bottom, which fried a bunch of transistors when they turned it on. It was replaced by air-cooled core. Actually, in my building it was a 7094/7044 Direct Couple. The next building over had one too. In the second floor of the main Space Flight Operations Facility there were six stand-alone 7094s with a couple of 1401s and a 7040 doing card-to-to-tape, tape-to-card, tape-to-print. The 7040 was also connected to a Univac 419 in the basement that was connected to teletype machines at tracking stations near Barstow, CA, Madrid, Johannesburg, and Tidbinbilla. I added code to the Deep Space Network scheduling program to convert its output to Baudot so schedules could be sent over the TTY instead of mailing listings from the 1403s. Tom Smith, who maintained DCOS for the Direct Couple, referred to it as that "Damned Confusing Operating System." The entire listing fit in his brief case. In 1968 the two DCOS systems, and the six stand-alone 7094s, and the 7040, were replaced by three Univac 1108s with 1004s, and remote DCT2000s later replaced by 9300s. Univac made nice computers buy really crappy printers. Each of our 1108s routinely ran with 50 demand jobs and ten batch jobs. Univac insisted that wasn't possible. And they didn't want our modifications that made it possible. The listing for Exec 8 was 3,000 pages. 1108s were soon augmented with two 1106s, then replaced by three 1110s, then two 1100/40s, then one Unisys 2200 and XTs and ATs on every desk. When they put an AT on my desk (with a giant 20MB hdd) I observed that DOS 3.10 was crap — but it was on every desk. So I told my broker to buy Microsoft with my 1984 $1,200 income tax refund. He asked "What's Microsoft?" It doubled, split, doubled, split, …. When MS stock stagnated I sold it for $300,000. The first thing we did with our ATs was to replace the 12 MHz crystals with 16 MHz crystals. Soon after we replaced the 80286 with an Intel InBoard that had an 80386 on it, then 80486 MB, then Pentium, …. I switched to OS/2 instead of Windoze, then RedHat. Now on Debian at home.