On Tue, 09 May 2000, Edward P Luwish wrote:

> 
> Well, maybe a 1620 port - someone in the Pacific Northwest has one that
> apparently works.  This machine would do a great job with LargeIntegers, since
> the word length was limited only by the size of the core memory (20 to 60k,
> depending on the depth of your pockets) and the fact that you needed room for
> both operands (and possibly the program, too).  You can even redefine arithmetic,
> which was table-driven!  The Model 2 had an adder, but the Model 1 used both
> multiplication and addition tables.  You could get disk drives for these
> machines, and the two-pass FORTRAN-IID (D for disk) compiler was actually pretty
> good.  The 1620 was supposed to have been the "scientific" counterpart to the
> "business" 1401.  The 1620 was my introduction to computers (1968) - does anyone
> else remember this wonderful machine?
> 


[snip]

Yes, actually, these were my introductions, too.  But, alas, mine was in 1964
on the 1620, and on the 1401 a bit later.  I do recall the 1620 having 80K characters,
and, initially, software multiply/divide.  I used it with FORTRAN, too, but eventually
learned about groupmarks and wordmarks, thingies which were on the 1401, too.
My introduction was when I was in 6th grade and computers were very exotic
things.

The disk packs on the 1401 had a whoppy one million bytes or, er, EBCDIC
characters, I believe.  

And probably the most impressive demo of the time was the hack transported
from the Altair, that is, the music playing thing.  Except the 1401, I believe, 
did it using its 1403 printer.  How crude....

 --jtg

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