Best thing Grace evenr invented was the "Hopper loop".. ya know when they
say it's impossible to make something run fast, and you DO make it run fast
and the put in a delay loop.. Grace her self called it a "Hopper loop"...
Then slowly over time you keep decressing it's time constant and make you
part of the program "magically" run faster.... That "Old Doll" knew more
about people and how to bend managment than she knew about Comp Sci and
that's a Hell of a lot!!

Yeah that PerSci was trouble from day one..

The damn servo on the voice coil would drift and about every six months I'd
hear "WHACK!.. BBBZZZ" as it finely got to far out of cal and the head
assembly just went to full extension and stayed there.. Sigh..time to drag
out the old HewPee scope and recall the damn thing... good thing I also had
the Dysan calibration disk :-).

I never had an issue with the head loader, since I had "home brewed" my disk
controller. IIRC I just put and external enable on it and managed it
myself... wasn't too much of a problem since I was writing my own BIOS...
:-)

I finely replaced it when a buddy went to work for National Semi and found
couple of Sugart 801's he could..uhhh..err...umm "Surplus" to me :-)

Ahh yet another "war story".. I took the PerSci and the I/O Selectric up to
a West Coast Computer Fair and sold them... I actually did what became known
as "Trade Show Squating"... We didn't "buy a table" we'd just hit the show
and walked around till we found an empty table.. Set out our stuff, sell it
as fast as we could and the leave...LOL...

--.- Dave


"Jon Elson" wrote in message
...
Dave August wrote:
Senior in High School IBM360, honors claass took us to the "Naval Post
Graduate School" in Monterey and taught us BAL360, met Dick Hamming and
Grace Hopper there... Dick was on staff, they brought Grace in to give US
our nanoseconds...
WOW, I only heard her speak on an NPR interview shortly before her death,
but she was a great speaker, and of course, had the MOST AMAZING
experiences!

I spent $1000 (no typo, 1 kilobuck) to buy a Persi Dual 8 inch Floopy
drive and built my fiirst 8080 CP/M machine.
Yup, I actually visited the PerSci factory in the LA area while on a work
trip, and later bought one. I did have a lot of trouble with it, as I
never figured out how to make the single load solenoid work right with my
dual floppy drive interface board. I eventually just disabled the head
lifter mechanism and solved the problem.
Console was the ASR33 fro the 4004
dev system. 1 year later I salvaged a I/O selectric and that became the
console.
I got a thing that had an IBM selectric and paper tape reader and punch,
and figured out an interface to it. It was called a "Dura". I used that
as a printer for a while. I made my own glass TTY by laboriously wire
wrapping a clone of a commercial terminal we had at work.

Jon