SW for drawing logic diagrams

IBM punched cards date from the 1920s. At Bletchley Park in England,

2,000,000 punched cards were used each week for storing decrypted German messagesduring WWII:

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Paper tape was used on the Teletype Model 33, introduced in 1963, long after punched card readers were available:

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Paper tape was read at 5,000 cps at Bletchley Park during WWII.

Both were available when you started. Which ever one you used was probably determined by the budget of the department.

Reply to
Steve Wilson
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My first computer, a PDP8/I, came with an ASR33 included, for $12,800. After a while we added a high-speed fanfold paper tape reader for something like $2K.

After I got a PDP-11, which also came with an ASR33, we got a card reader and I interfaced it, and I also designed an interface to an IBM

029 card punch. I patched the FOCAL language interpreter to read and punch cards.

Rick Merrill, the author of FOCAL, sent me a paper listing of his interpreter. We card-punched it, hacked the PDP-11 assembler to read cards, and then started making our own versions of FOCAL for process control applications.

I found a bug for Rick, and think I'm the only person named in his PDP-11 source code of FOCAL.

Eventually I got tired of programming, and don't do much these days. A little PowerBasic engineering app now and then maybe. Hardware design is still interesting, and more valuable than typing code.

--
John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

The pdp-8 came with a card reader:

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The pdp-11 also had several card readers available:

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So you really didn't have to hack the pdp-11 to interface to a card reader.

Reply to
Steve Wilson

We had one if the first PDP-11s, and all those things weren't available yet. And DEC's prices were insane.

We ordered the 11 with 4K words of core, and they accidentally shipped it with 8K. That was a $4000 mistake.

--
John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  
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Reply to
John Larkin

You informed them, of course.

Reply to
Steve Wilson

Me? I was a humble junior engineer.

TI also once shipped us 9000 pieces of a superb high-beta PNP transistor, branded SK4093, with packing slip addressed to Burr-Brown. See above.

--
John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  
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Reply to
John Larkin

That doesn't matter. You should have screamed bloody murder. Management cannot act on a problem if they don't know about it.

I once owned a company that made test equipment for the hard disk industry. These cost $50,000 each. We often got duplicate checks for payment. When my accountants told me, I always said send them back.

Payments and Receivables are normally two separate departments.

Hopefully, someone in their Receivables would have to explain where the duplicate check came from, and they would fix the problem. But if nobody said anything, they couldn't fix it. It usually got fixed.

See above.

Reply to
Steve Wilson

It was a small company. The President sure knew about it. He told me.

Accounting people always reconcile things. A $50K imbalance would not get missed.

--
John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  
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Reply to
John Larkin

Nice of you to let us know.

Reply to
Steve Wilson

Our schematics are all in color but no one I know prints them in color. I don't. We have D-size plotters but they don't seem to be used much anymore, either. ...at least by the electrical engineers. However, the space cadets seem to use them. ;-)

Ick. All of the wires on one page that go to the last have to exist on every page. That's really dumb.

I think all our EEs use searchable PDFs or the schematic capture program during debug now.

Programs are linear (procedural languages, anyway).

Reply to
krw

Provided that somebody else checks their Gerbers. ;)

CHeers

Phil Hobbs

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Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
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Reply to
Phil Hobbs

I use both the EDA tool and B-size paper. Paper I can scribble on without breaking the flow, and then capture for the ECO list.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
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Reply to
Phil Hobbs

Lol, tell that to Bill Gates!

Rick C.

Reply to
gnuarm.deletethisbit

I don't know if it is what you want, but you could look at

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Reply to
Simon S Aysdie

MS used to make money from writing software - but that has ended long ago. Now they mainly make their money from patent licences (or a protection racket, if you prefer - they make vastly more income per Android phone sold than per Windows phone sold), services (like Office

365 or Azure), and closed monopolies (like XBox software). Pure software sales are a surprisingly small part of their business these days.
Reply to
David Brown

As is innovation.

Reply to
mpm

Yes, and now the next generation calls them Arduino and "sketches". Sketches, as an acronym for source code?!? Makes me think the next generation is completely screwed.

But then, they ruined music (rap), so why not programming too?

Yikes, I'm turning into an old fart.

Reply to
mpm

No, we're better than ever. The kids are turning into idiots.

--
John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

Socrates said it earlier, but he probably isn't the first to think that way. It's a persistent failing in men of a certain age. On the whole, things have got better rather than worse since his time, so he was evidently wrong.

We'll have to wait a while before we can be equally sure that John Larkin is just as wrong, but it looks like a safe bet.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

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