Gawd, they know how to make me feel old...
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Member 10119140 wrote:
Pretty quickly learned how to cold-start it by using the bit switches mounted on the front of the selectric typewriter that was the operator's consol...
You are describing a different machine. The 1620 (either version) didn't have bit switches sufficient to boot the machine. The cold start was done with a punch card in the card reader. I think it was 35000000000... mumble mumble. I used to have the 30 or so digits memorized. Warm start was done by hitting the halt button and typing 4900796"RS" on the console, which was a branch to location 00796 in core (the main monitor loop).
I'm retired. There's a nap for that... - Harvey
You are so right - I am remembering the bit switches on the IBM 1130... on the 1620 it was "sense switches". And now that you remind me, I do remember that we memorized the cold start sequence and typed it in....but that was 50+ years ago. Speaking of cold start cards, we made up a cold start card for the 1130 that worked correctly no matter what orientation it was put in the card hopper. (Really!)
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Comitstrip: First Computer[^] My first was an Amstrad 1640: EGA graphics, 640K RAM, 8MHz processor, no math coprocessor (but a socket so you could add one), no HDD, but twin 5 1/2" floppies (360Kb per disk). And that was second hand... What was your first "real" computer? (I'm not counting Spectrums and their ilk here: if it had a cassette tape it doesn't count :laugh: )
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
Acorn Archimedes 305. A great machine for hacking about in both the hardware and software sense. Great BBC basic with inline ARM assembler. I remember changing a magazine mandelbrot program to do 64 bit arithmetic. Lots of folks hacked the !Sprites files so icons for programs were unrecognisable on 'hackers' machines. Matthew Broadbent of the Auckland Acorn Users Group created a sound sampler by attaching resistors to the parallel port lines. A binary chop style algorithm established the analog to digital value. I hacked the ST-506 cable to split the cylinders of a big external Hard Drive so it looked like two disks (too many cylinders). I've never messed with my subsequent PCs like I messed with the Archimedes.
I am a set of distortions of spacetime. Jeremy Thomson
