Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2012/12/27
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]On 2012 Dec 20, at 9:55 PM, Herbert Kanner <kanner at acm.org> wrote: > After Hollerith retired, some investors who had already bought a company > that made time clock and a calculating grocery scale bought Hollerith's > company. Eventually they hired as CEO a guy who had been fired by National > Cash Register. That guy got rid of the clocks and scales and eventually > renamed the company International Business Machines, later renamed IBM. > His name was Thomas J. Watson. I believe that IBM continued to make clocks up through the 1960s. Our school system had IBM clocks all synchronized. Punch cards were in still in relatively common use through the late 1970s and early 1980s. As an EE undergrad my first courses in programming (FORTRAN) were on a B6700 whose input was on punch cards. However my course in assembly language was taught on DIGITAL PDP-11 minicomputers. But my course in circuit design used SPICE whose input was back to being on card decks. A colleague worked with me to move SPICE over to the PDP-11 which was a very difficult task because the program was quite large, the amount of memory we had to work with was fairly small (64kb total for operating system and programs), and the tools were relatively crude. Ah, those were the days. Today there's probably a version of SPICE that runs on the iPhone and is substantially faster than the mainframe version. Wow. I think I'll go watch some "Dr. Who". Anyone seen Tom Baker??? Adam