Thoughts, tangents, personal big data. May I bore you for my enjoyment?

[whole diary]

[grahame]

More philosophically, there are few things more sad and obsolete than code written for a long-dead computer system. All that time and effort spent crafting clever ways of doing something with that limited hardware, and a few years later you could buy a box to do the same thing for a few pounds.

But so many of those algorithms developed in user code are learning material for firmware which is learning material for code in hardware. I celebrate these building blocks onto which we can build magnificent applications and solve problems we could not solve without them.

I guess that's a 4014, in the photo with its trousers down!

We had a 4010 - too small to be very useful, a couple of 4014s and a 4016 with it's massive 25 inch screen in EC&M at Rolls-Royce in the eighties. I can just about conjure up the special smell of the 4361 Hard Copy Device in action, if I try really hard. In their latter years, we had the terminals souped up to run at 9600 baud.

Kids today: they don't know they're born...

Ah yes - my predecessor as the Tektronix sales rep for the West of England (Swindon to Penzance) sold you the 4010s.  I sold Rolls load of 4014-1 options 1, 30 and 34 when I moved from tech support into sales (with messages from many that technical people cannot sell!) .  Glad you found them far more productive than the smaller ones - none of which were MY sale to you 

The 4016 was quite a late addition to the Tek dumb screen range.  I recall when the very first one arrive at Heathrow and got dropped in its box off a forklift and I had to pop down to Heathrow to evaluate the damage as "the expert" on a device I have only seen up to that point on a brochure.

Learned a lot in my just-over-a-year in sales, the South West becoming the best in the country and the only one that made target.  British Aerospace, Westland Helicopters, Geothermal Energy Project a nd a number of other very interesting places with military links.  And of course Rolls!  My sales manager (RIP, Peter) supported me as I failed to make all the expected subsidiary targets like number of customers visited per day - I think I manage to do 42% of what the powers that be wanted.

P.S. Good on Brock for selling you the 4010s and perhaps the odd 4012 before the 4014 was released!

[Oxonhutch]

Below was the first PC that I was exposed to way back in 1979 - the Commodore PET with its particular version of BASIC [courtesy of Wiki-Commons Cc-by-sa-2.0-fr].

Though I cut my programming teeth at a tender age on a TI-58 that I took to uni - that taught me program [sic] logic. When it came to the Commodore's BASIC, it was just a shift in language statements.

My favourite is the programmer that was sent out to the shops by his wife'

   "Get me a pint of milk, and if they have eggs, get me a dozen".

He arrives home with 12 pints of milk,

Wife: , "What the actual.. ? !!!"

"They had eggs."

[JayMac]

My first introductions to computing were (at home) a Commodore VIC 20, then a ZX Spectrum. At school we had Acorn Electrons and a few BBC^» (British Broadcasting Corporation - home page) B Microcomputers.

[bradshaw]

I was teaching at a school in Dorchester back along. They introduced BBC^» (British Broadcasting Corporation - home page)-Bs and comouting to the curriculum.
I was somewhat surprised when returning for a new term to see that I was timetabled to teach programming. The more so since I had absolutely no experience in that area. What followed was me learning the work myself and teaching it next day!
In the end I found getting them to make very simple ‘games’ was a good way of learning the coding needed and one they could engage in.

At home my route was by way of the Amstrad 8256 PCW which I upgraded to an 8512 by adding memory. Word processing was Locoscript!

[grahame]

I have so many thoughts.  And memories.  And so much to write; whether anyone actually wants to listen (or read) is another matter. 

And yet more of my background - reminiscing about the choice of where to start work as I left Uni.

https://grahamellis.uk/blog1763.html

[Mark A]

an Interdata minicomputer close coupled to a storage tube

I can't even begin to imagine...

Mark

[CyclingSid]

For those who might want to re-visit the digital days of yore:
https://www.readingmuseum.org.uk/whats-on/reading%E2%80%99s-digital-revolution-exhibition
Not been, but there again I was an analogue endangered species.

[grahame]

an Interdata minicomputer close coupled to a storage tube

I can't even begin to imagine...

Mark

From the archives ...

Real:


Imaginary:

[Mark A]

Ah. Good grief.

Mark

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_tube

[CyclingSid]

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_tube; "They were replaced with other technologies, notably core memory."

Somewhere I worked I can remember rows of ladies sat winding core stores. Not my work area, but presumably each one was one bit. There was a programming device, presumably same technology, consisting of eight lamps and nine switches. You set your lamps (1 or 0) and used the ninth switch to load the byte of data. All in the name of hardening equipment for military use.

How the world has moved on.

[stuving]

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_tube; "They were replaced with other technologies, notably core memory."

Somewhere I worked I can remember rows of ladies sat winding core stores. Not my work area, but presumably each one was one bit. There was a programming device, presumably same technology, consisting of eight lamps and nine switches. You set your lamps (1 or 0) and used the ninth switch to load the byte of data. All in the name of hardening equipment for military use.

How the world has moved on.

I'm sure production of core store was automated to some extent, but it remained expensive. Core was also inherently slow, with only modest improvements over time. By the later 1970s it was semiconductor memory that was taking over, and of course since it had learned Moore's Law it got rapidly cheaper and faster.

For example, for a typical block of 4K of 16 bit words you need 16 core planes, each with an array of 64x64 cores, and three or four wires threaded through each of them. Tektronix's main competition was DEC's GT40 terminals, based on a computer with core memory. At the start of the 1970s that cost twice as much as a Tek 4010, but the difference dropped over a few years. And customers preferred the live vector display (though no-one liked the light pens!). You also got a proper computer built in, and a free copy of Moonlander.

[grahame]

For example, for a typical block of 4K of 16 bit words you need 16 core planes, each with an array of 64x64 cores, and three or four wires threaded through each of them. Tektronix's main competition was DEC's GT40 terminals, based on a computer with core memory. At the start of the 1970s that cost twice as much as a Tek 4010, but the difference dropped over a few years. And customers preferred the live vector display (though no-one liked the light pens!). You also got a proper computer built in, and a free copy of Moonlander.

Indeed - but the 4010 with 1024x768 addressing on an 11" screen was surpassed by the 4014 with 4096x3120 addressing on a 19" and the 4016 on a 26" screen.  And they were used for the very high res stuff.  All these years later, I can probably let it slip that the profit margin on the 4014 was - err - rather good and at the same time production could not keep up with demand - very long lead shipping times.  The production process at times was a bit delicate, and at one time it was said that the rejection rate suddenly shot up to 70% because of the deodorant (or was it perfume?) one of the production staff used.  Of course,  this was all pretty confidential stuff at the time but 40 years later ....