[Leica] Old computer story

[richard at richardmanphoto.com (Richard Man)]

We lived in Lowell, closed to the Wang Lab headquarter. Unfortunately Fred
Wang wanted to be and probably more suited to be a teacher instead of a
CEO, and the company fortune dropped to zero in just a few years. I learned
to program on a DEC-10 KL10 model but never did get to see the magnetic
core. I think they only decommissioned it finally just a few years ago.
Among the notable features (like 9 bit bytes and 36 bit words) is the JIFY
instruction.


On Sun, Dec 15, 2013 at 1:30 PM, Herbert Kanner <kanner at acm.org> wrote:

> I?ve got to investigate just what Wang patented and when (core memory).
> I?m pretty sure that the most common core memory configuration: vertical
> and horizontal wires that by coincidence establish an address (the core
> plane carries one bit of of the value at that address) and a sensing wire
> that in a series of diagonal loops goes through every core in the plane.
> That organization was invented by Jay Forester for the Whirlwind computer
> at MIT and I think it preceded Wang?s invention. I?ll see what Wikipedia
> has to say on the subject, but I actually met a man who was on Foresters
> project at a time when the memory of Whirlwind was the unreliable Williams
> tubes, and he told me how he saw these magnetic cores used in a shift
> register on a relay computer at Harvard, went back to MIT and bugged
> Forester about ?why can?t we make an addressable computer memory using
> these cores.
>
> Herbert Kanner
> kanner at acm.org
> 650-326-8204
>
> Question authority and the authorities will question you.
>
>
>
>
> On Dec 13, 2013, at 3:07 PM, lrzeitlin at aol.com wrote:
>
> > Interesting old computer story. In this day of smart phones it's hard to
> believe that computers were once as big as houses. As a young college
> student I used to walk by a building on campus that emitted sounds like a
> threshing machine. One day I wandered in and found that it was the home of
> the Aiken Mark 1 computer, a 30 foot long electro mechanical device that
> was like a Frieden Calculating machine on steroids. The noise was the sound
> of thousands of relays opening and closing. It took 3 seconds to add a pair
> of numbers, about 16 seconds to divide them. Dr. Aiken started work on it
> before WW2 and it continued in operation well into the Korean war cranking
> out data for the military. I was shown around the lab by An Wang, a
> graduate student, who later invented the core memory and founded Wang
> computing. In fact the first computer I ever bought for myself was a Wang
> 700 that required programming in assembly language, displayed the results
> on Nixie tubes and stored programs on audio cassette cartridges. High tech
> indeed.
> >
> > Larry Z
> >
> >
> >
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