I learned on a 1620 in high school and then moved on to a 1401.
Someone said that multiply was limited to 100 digits, but that wasn't true. The result was stored at 99 and down and then wrapped back to the top of memory and would just keep going. I wrote a set of floating point routines and estimated that a 25 x 25 Kramer's Rule matrix inversion would take about 2 days.

I remember that my names: MICHAEL KELLY DONEGAN were all valid instructions on a 1401 so I could sign my programs by writing some really arcane assembly language.

The strangest machine I programmed was an NCR Century 100. It only had 18 (count 'em) instructions, half of those were branches. It took about an hour to assemble our programs. It had a really cool operating system with the only good error messages I have ever seen.

    mkd

Bob Arning wrote:

> On Tue, 09 May 2000 14:06:24 -0600 Edward P Luwish <eluwish at uswest.com> wrote:
> >The 1620 was my introduction to computers (1968) - does anyone
> >else remember this wonderful machine?
>
> Yes, it was my first IBM experience (1966 or 7). Night classes in the summer at a high school without adequate air-conditioning. We sometimes had to leave the room to let it cool down a bit. FLAG (Fortran Load-and-go) and GOTRAN were nice because they didn't need to punch out the object code as an intermediate step.
>
> Cheers,
> Bob