Rare Apple I computer sells for $216,000 in London

Optimist.

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The 'Rod-bot' occasionally gets stuck in a loop, requiring a reboot (it must be running Windows).

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that reliable.

two with a problem.

That's very odd. My shop had a dozen 26s and one or two 29s. It was very rare to have one with a down IBM card on it. Those keypunches were used by students who had minimal training about the care and feeding of keypunches. The most common mainentance problem was when a student forgot to flip the switch which lifted the wheels off the drumcard. But that was fixed in a couple of minutes.

How many did you have?

/BAH

Nah. My philosophy is that everyone knows something interesting.

/BAH

All the line printers I saw used sprocketed paper that was either

80 or 132 columns (10 cpi) and usually 66 lines (6 lpi). A4 was usually used in daisy wheel printers, although I do recall paper for "NLQ" dot matrix and early inkjet printers (built like dot matrix printers with an inkjet head instead of hammers and ribbon) that was sprocketed with "micro perforations" such that when you (carefully) stripped the sprocket holes and separated the sheets the result was A4 sized with smooth (ish) edges - except where it tore while pulling the sprocket strips off.

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I've always been a big fan of insertion sorts for such things - then I can use a binary search. But I don't think that was the main reason my assembler was so much faster. Univac's assembler was heavily I/O-bound; it must have been doing a lot of passes, or was keeping too much stuff on disk. The binary had 40 overlays or so. Mine consisted of 4 phases, with one overlay each for the second, third and fourth phases. The first phase read the source file and expanded macros, the second one read the expanded code and built the symbol table, the third read the expanded code again and generated the listing, object code, and cross-reference data, and the fourth sorted and printed the cross-reference data.

If I was assembling a program from a card deck, the first pass worked directly from the card input without reading it into a disk file first. You could hear the card reader stutter or pause at each macro. The second phase ran in about the time it took the card reader motor to time out and shut down, at which point the printer fired up and started cranking out the listing.

This was on the Univac 9300, although I used the same principles when I wrote my OS/3 assembler. Rumour has it that Univac's OS/3 assembler was a hacked version of IBM's DOS/360 assembler, whose source code somebody found in the trunk of a car. Another rumour states that IBM wanted it found. :-)

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I don't think there was a threshold so much as programmers had the lowest priority for machine time, and the quicker I could get in and out, the more likely I could wheedle access.

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Slow is no problem - get a scanner with a sheet feeder, fire it up, and go to bed. It's the preuf reeding that's the killer.

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In our student area, there were usually one or two punches down due to jams. For me, this was a benefit, for I knew how to clear them. In a student area with long lineups for a punch, it was as if one had been reserved for me; I'd walk past the lineups, sit down at the jammed punch, clear it, punch my cards, and leave the punch available for someone else.

If you cared to dig down inside the machine and retrieve the missing star wheels, and knew how to re-attach them...

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keithr wrote

write on.

pockets.

numbering.

of paper.

Your problem.

I did anyway.

Have fun explaining the hardware they had in the late 60s.

keithr wrote

pockets.

Nope, just shows they are convenient to write on.

jmfbahciv wrote

that reliable.

with a problem.

I was talking about just 029s.

Rather more than you were tallking about.

Wheedling worked? :-)

/BAH

werent that reliable.

two with a problem.

Sheesh! Can't you answer a question with a fact?

/BAH

Sure. Neither of the above two breakages required a field service call...usually.

/BAH

The program isn't that smart. It uses TIF files for input. It has a numer of other drawbacks one of which is that it does a poor job of deskewing the image.

Besides, scanners that can read B sized paper that have feeders aren't all that cheap.

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jmfbahciv wrote

werent that reliable.

two with a problem.

Everyone can see you are lying, as always.

call...usually.

Irrelevant to whether they had to be on maintenance contract anyway.

werent that reliable.

or two with a problem.

You seem to be having a conception problem. A simple, "I can't remember" answer would have sufficed.

You must go through a carton of kleenix every day.

/BAH