On 4/11/2010 12:27 AM, LDosser wrote:
"Morris Dovey" wrote in message
...
On 4/10/2010 9:05 PM, LDosser wrote:
"Morris Dovey" wrote in message
...

Sorry, but after spending more than a half-century developing software
(link in sig),

I'll see your Spectra 70/45 and raise you an RCA 501 and 301. )

You win - besides, the 70/45 was just a thin film approximation to a
360/30 (same instruction set and I/O devices, but had a sexier front
panel)

Operating that 501 was like playing an organ ...

When we got the 70/45s I went to supervision. All the fun had been taken
out of operation.

Half decent pic he

http://archive.computerhistory.org/r...6273.fc.lg.jpg

Might even be me in the photo - wore a suit just like that. )

Hmm - I may have seen one of those. At one point in '65 the outfit I was
working for needed more capacity so one Saturday I was loaded into a cab
with a couple dozen tapes to borrow the 70/45 at NIPSCO (Northern
Illinois Public Service Co).

They still had their pre-Spectra system (just in case) and it looked a
lot like that.

That trip was my intro to RCA's high-speed tape drives - which, as I
discovered, meant that if they glitched they could suck about 250' of
tape into a vacuum column faster than an operator could say ****, and
pack it so tight that it took a letter opener to pry out.

By the third time it'd stopped being even mildly interesting. (Hit the
COIN button, abort the run, pry the tape out of the drive, rewind the
other drives, mount a backup tape, and re-start the program. Ugh.

--
Morris Dovey
DeSoto Solar
DeSoto, Iowa USA
http://www.iedu.com/DeSoto/