From: lasner@watsun.cc.columbia.edu (Charles Lasner)
Subject: Re: Mel: Fact or Fiction?
Reply-To: lasner@watsun.cc.columbia.edu (Charles Lasner)
Organization: Columbia University
Date: Thu, 16 Apr 1992 07:05:29 GMT

In article <1992Apr14.141601.6534@unx.sas.com> thacher@renbourn.unx.sas.com (Clarke Thacher) writes:
>In article <ZVGEA3F@taronga.com> peter@taronga.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
>>In article <1g4zD0#5Y7TMc91F3txBBKKvL5OsXmP=eric@snark.thyrsus.com> eric@snark.thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond) writes:
>>>In <1992Apr11.003258.19395@SSD.intel.com> Paul Pierce wrote:
>>>> I have a Litton 1230.
>>
>>>I have a dim memory of someone (perhaps Ed Nather) telling me of a connection
>>>between Royal-McBee and Litton Industries.  It may be that the Litton 1230
>>>is the same machine with a different faceplate, or a close relative.
>>
>>Sounds like this machine is a dead cert for the Computer Folklore Museum.
>>
>>Now we just need a Computer Folklore Museum.
>>
>>A copy of the blackjack program listing would help...
>
>
>The first time that I visited the Computer Museum (when it was still in
>Marlboro) one of the first exhibits was an LGP-30.  The sign in front of
>it called it the Minicomputer of the Vacuum tube era.  My father, who 
>was with me, got a nostalgic look in his eyes.  He worked on one of those
>in the early 60's at Argonne Labs.  At the time that he worked on it,
>he could either use FORTRAN or machine language (not assembler).

Just confirming a point that got a little lost in the Mel thread: assembler
as we know it today was essentially unavailable for these machines, even as
late as the '60's, these early machines never developed what we remotely
would call a symbolic assembler.  Someone complained that Mel was such a
bad programmer that he used machine, *not* assembly language.  The point is
that this wasn't an option for Mel, so out-of-context arguments mean little.
Further, since the young narrator of our Mel tale was hired to attempt to
write a FORTRAN for the thing, it was obviously De Rigeur to write in machine
language for all company programmers at that point in time.

Just to get some time-line perspective: 1962 PDP-5 and LINC were introduced
with rudimentary but functional symbolic assemblers that ran in minimal-size
machines.  Drum memory computers would have slower, but larger memories than
these newer machines.  I guess company policy was to follow Von Neumann's lead
about not wasting precious calculation time on book-keeping :-).

cjl

obUL:  DEC almost introduced the PDP-8/s as not only a slow serial-arithmetic
version of the PDP-8 (well almost an -8), but intended it to be called a 
different model, namely PDP-10.  Further, the memory would be the spinning
platter that holds 32K x 13 bits that became the DF32 word-addressable fixed
disk peripheral that has special speed accomodation for the 8/s if necessary.
Thus, this would be a model that had all of the overhead of a drum machine,
but would have had all 32K while "normal" -8's would aspire to that figure,
but would mostly have 4K, occasionally 8K, and rarely more.  Also, it would
have memory parity standard.

	This memory design also became the RS64 for the unibus -11, and also
the RF08, RF09/15, and RF11 as well.  Some of these were eventually emulated
using RAM chips.

Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers