(repost using email address I signed up with)

In 1960 (+ or - a year) I took a programming class at ASU where we used 
the LGP-30.  It had a 1000 (1024?) word drum and each word was 32 bits.  
The drum was the main memory--there was no other storage.  It had 
16--yes 16!--instructions with paper tape input and typewriter output 
and it had a one or two inch oscilloscope where you could watch the 
instructions execute.  Part of each instruction was the address of the 
next instruction to be executed.  Too few today have the assembly 
language background to appreciate the oddities of  the machine, but it 
had some doozies.  Five years later I had graduated and was working at 
Motorola Semiconductor on McDowell and transferred into the computer 
section of the QC department.  We had a GE 205 computer with 8192 20 bit 
words of memory.  If I remember correctly, a single word memory access 
took 36 microseconds.  When sorting 30 row, 12 column table using the 
Shell sort algorithm, the console lights made a several second long 
pattern that was quite easy to spot.  BTW, the 205 was the entry level 
knockoff of the GE215 box.  Since the 215 had a memory cycle time of 18 
microseconds, GE added a bunch of circuit boards to steal every other 
clock cycle to make the machine slower so they could lease it for less.  
Go figure!

Yes, for lots of years I used decks of cards for both programs and 
data.  If you had any sense, you sequenced your cards in col 73-80 so 
that when (not if--when) the deck was dropped, a few passes through the 
sorter would fix things--and you initially sequenced by 10s or 20s to 
allow for later additions.

While I wouldn't take anything for the experiences of those years, I 
wouldn't go back to them for anything either.

Mark Jarvis

Jim wrote:

>Lynn Newton wrote:
>  
>
>>But I'm sure there are a number of subscribers to this list
>>who can one-up me with "I remember when" stories, by margins
>>of several years at least.
>>    
>>
>
>I don't know if this would be in the one up category, but I remember 
>being a high school freshman in 1981 and spending time after school in 
>the math teacher's room messing around with his TRS80 with a whopping 
>4KB RAM and running programs stored on cassette tape.
>
>  
>

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