"Morris Dovey" wrote in message
...
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.

Yeah, those babies were Fun. We used to have contests to see how quickly you
could get all the drives off BT and then rewound - using the console. Then
there was the tape mount rodeo! And with 3/4" tape, you did some upper body
work every shift. When we got the Spectras, I wrote some cod to emulate the
tape drives using the spectra disk drives. Really speeded up the stuff we
still had to run using the 501 and 301 emulators. Drove the 501 prototype
for a couple weeks in Camden, NJ. IIRC, RCA had several in Viet Nam.
Supposedly one running in a tent, which I can believe as ours could take all
kinds of a licking and keep on ticking!

Did they have a goony bird paper tape reader? Sometimes you had to use the
eraser on the end of a pencil to keep the pt reader from snapping the tape.
Idea was to use an Unsharpened pencil - DAMHIKT! I used to be able to read
the paper tape manually.