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ibm's magnum opus |
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Posted by ntrainride on Thu Dec 3 21:28:18 2020 when i see one my hands go to it like they were possessed. a true work of art. made when the name ibm proudly meant something.before they gave up the ghost on actual products. before they sold out to the chinamen. they had a huge printer factory on freekin' dekalb avenue! actually made the damn things, in brooklyn. imagine that. i applied for job there once, sometime in the 70's. walked down to it from where i was staying in taylor whyth houses in williamsburg. didn't get hired but it sure was cool to know it was there. anyway, the selectric was my favorite typewriter. loved watching that ball a spinnin'. best keyboard ever made, i think. a real deep stroke honey. 
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Re: ibm's magnum opus |
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Posted by pragmatist on Thu Dec 3 21:42:13 2020, in response to ibm's magnum opus, posted by ntrainride on Thu Dec 3 21:28:18 2020. IBM made some of the best electric typewriters ever built.... |
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Re: ibm's magnum opus |
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Posted by ntrainride on Thu Dec 3 23:01:06 2020, in response to Re: ibm's magnum opus, posted by pragmatist on Thu Dec 3 21:42:13 2020. i've never seen a shoddy ibm electromechanical device. |
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Re: ibm's magnum opus |
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Posted by Orange Blossom Special on Fri Dec 4 08:15:08 2020, in response to ibm's magnum opus, posted by ntrainride on Thu Dec 3 21:28:18 2020. "huge printer factory on freekin' dekalb avenue! actually made the damn things, in brooklyn. imagine that"Imagine one company making anything at all, and not subcontracting every single key and part to hundreds of subcontractors all over the country (even world), including payroll, and the white collar jobs. Imagine a place where you can switch departments, or even get promoted, or the people you need being in the same country. People complain that their IT support is based in India, but they're in the middle of nowhere themselves with no future and....you know that is one positive. I've had managers all based out of state before whom I never see! |
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Re: ibm's magnum opus |
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Posted by ntrainride on Fri Dec 4 09:00:10 2020, in response to Re: ibm's magnum opus, posted by Orange Blossom Special on Fri Dec 4 08:15:08 2020. hate to say it but american companies, to a great extent are now run by people who have no clue as to doing what you noted.i blame greed, unrealistic dependency on the ability of computers to do everything, by people who don't know anything but their SPECIFIC company software, and lawyers. also, unnecessary "specialization" it seems impossible that there is no way at all anymore for an american company to do it all "in house". with exceptions of course, but probably ninety percent of our companies are run by unrealistic spoiled selfish assholes. hell, at least carnagie knew steel. note: many of those indian technical "experts" our companies love to import to take our jobs aren't really that good. i've spoken with a number of them and it's amazing how little they actually know. but if nobody in your company knows computers you will have no way to check on their actual skill sets. |
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Re: ibm's magnum opus |
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Posted by pragmatist on Fri Dec 4 09:54:24 2020, in response to Re: ibm's magnum opus, posted by ntrainride on Thu Dec 3 23:01:06 2020. "bulletproof" Selectric series typewriters were great, in comp-sci class, we used the key punch consoles, never had a problem, the line printers for output never broke, card readers occasionally did weird things, but I don't remember much about why, I'm thinking back 45+years! |
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Re: ibm's magnum opus |
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Posted by Stephen Bauman on Fri Dec 4 11:11:35 2020, in response to Re: ibm's magnum opus, posted by ntrainride on Thu Dec 3 23:01:06 2020. i've never seen a shoddy ibm electromechanical device.You never dealt with a 559 punch card duplicator or 557 interpreter. Clearing card jams on an 024 or 026 key punch wasn't fun either. |
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Re: ibm's magnum opus |
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Posted by Orange Blossom Special on Fri Dec 4 11:36:40 2020, in response to Re: ibm's magnum opus, posted by ntrainride on Fri Dec 4 09:00:10 2020. It gets worse than that. I spent time consulting in a major bank which had a few fancy skyscrapers. I still scratch my head at that scam. There was really nothing done there, every single process was outourced to some company. The whole purpose of the bank (outside of the investing department) was to a) mitigate risk on the loans, and b) to source what they needed from everyone else.There really is no point in any of them existing, they don't do anything that the big investment firms already do (which again, I am sure is all outsourced). And unlike those big firms, they fleece the poor folks with the checking accounts. Then there are these scams you see in the stores. Why do things still have the name RCA in outlet stores? The instruction manual is from some other company. The wiring. The box. The cerciut board. The healh insurance. The call center. The marketing agency. The film studio. The custodians. The building. The land. The parking lot. The light buld repair people. And when none of them do the work, they all blame each other. Sure ain't like the Hudsucker Proxy. I gotta get in on this assignment of benefits scam. Someone pays me $100/hour to do something, I pay soemone overseas $40/hour to do for me, and pocket the difference. That's living. |
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Re: ibm's magnum opus |
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Posted by ntrainride on Fri Dec 4 12:50:09 2020, in response to Re: ibm's magnum opus, posted by pragmatist on Fri Dec 4 09:54:24 2020. actually, the best overall keyboard i ever used was when i worked a kurzweil ocr reading machine system. that keyboard felt like it was designed by a committee of hands and wrists. thick and clunky. yet the keyboard action was literally perfect. the key spacing was genius. each keystroke , i mean, it was so deep you could hear both the down stroke and the key resuming its ready condition. a sliding sound...actually, a different sliding sound for the down and up motions.keying on it created a concert of subtle yet lively mechanical activity, if said concert was composed by a keypunch machine on lsd. |
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Re: ibm's magnum opus |
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Posted by ntrainride on Fri Dec 4 12:56:52 2020, in response to Re: ibm's magnum opus, posted by Stephen Bauman on Fri Dec 4 11:11:35 2020. your comment was...typical of your ilk.they were fixable mechanical machines. |
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Re: ibm's magnum opus |
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Posted by ntrainride on Fri Dec 4 12:58:59 2020, in response to Re: ibm's magnum opus, posted by Orange Blossom Special on Fri Dec 4 11:36:40 2020. just despicable. |
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Re: ibm's magnum opus |
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Posted by pragmatist on Fri Dec 4 13:04:34 2020, in response to Re: ibm's magnum opus, posted by ntrainride on Fri Dec 4 12:56:52 2020. many of the problems were caused by the users themselves...there was a reason for the old saying "do not fold, spindle, or mutilate" they did need decent PM, if they weren't kept clean and lubricated they did have issues. In the field, we had a series of machines with cartridge tape backup. If you didn't clean the heads, and the rubber rollers (we had long swabs and 91% alcohol) they would eat tapes once in a while. Some of the other vendors that didn't think PM was so important in a maintenance contract regretted it later. |
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Re: IBM’s magnum opus |
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Posted by Olog-hai on Fri Dec 4 13:29:07 2020, in response to Re: ibm's magnum opus, posted by ntrainride on Fri Dec 4 12:56:52 2020. Well, did you ever run a punch card machine? |
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Re: ibm's magnum opus |
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Posted by ntrainride on Fri Dec 4 13:31:42 2020, in response to Re: ibm's magnum opus, posted by pragmatist on Fri Dec 4 13:04:34 2020. truth. |
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Re: ibm's magnum opus |
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Posted by Stephen Bauman on Fri Dec 4 13:36:39 2020, in response to Re: ibm's magnum opus, posted by ntrainride on Fri Dec 4 12:56:52 2020. I was a teaching assistant for an introductory programming course some 55 years ago. Part of my responsibility was maintaining the EAM equiment for 300+ students.The 082 card sorter didn't jam but it did chew up cards and spew them all over the place. |
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Re: IBM’s magnum opus |
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Posted by ntrainride on Fri Dec 4 13:42:19 2020, in response to Re: IBM’s magnum opus, posted by Olog-hai on Fri Dec 4 13:29:07 2020. yes. not a lot but i used to do alot of temp work in the city. late 70's through the 80's. occasionally you'd get a job in an office that still used 'em. although mini-system key disk technology superseded key punch systems by the early part of the eighties..back then even uneducated yutzes such as myself were able to work in data processing, |
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Re: IBM’s magnum opus |
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Posted by pragmatist on Fri Dec 4 13:56:27 2020, in response to Re: IBM’s magnum opus, posted by ntrainride on Fri Dec 4 13:42:19 2020. We had remote access to BD of Ed, and UAPC (University Applications Processing Center/CUNY) on an as available basis for my courses. You punched your own cards, and they were read and transmitted over an acoustic coupled modem. 2 take aways..write programs efficiently, the more lines of code the more cards, and find a girlfriend who could type! |
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Re: IBM’s magnum opus |
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Posted by ntrainride on Fri Dec 4 14:09:37 2020, in response to Re: IBM’s magnum opus, posted by pragmatist on Fri Dec 4 13:56:27 2020. it was very satisfying to hear your modem make the connection. like a huge door swinging open to a world of wonder. |
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Re: ibm's magnum opus |
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Posted by Fisk Ave Jim on Fri Dec 4 14:27:33 2020, in response to Re: ibm's magnum opus, posted by Stephen Bauman on Fri Dec 4 11:11:35 2020. We used 029,& 129 IBM keypunch with verifiers. We'd have to punch out a program card & wrap it around a little drum reader. Card jams in those dinosaurs were tediously cleared with little card saws.All cards were then fed into IBM 4077 accounting machines with those heavy metal wire boards that printed, spaced, added & subtracted etc from information punched on the verified cards. The read cards were then stored into specially designed fireproof file cabinets that could fill up a room. Then the long 3 part printout would have to be separated by a awkward looking spreader that separated the copies from the very flammable carbons. All thought of as state of the art stuff...in 1974! |
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Re: ibm's magnum opus |
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Posted by FYBklyn1959 on Fri Dec 4 14:43:12 2020, in response to Re: ibm's magnum opus, posted by Fisk Ave Jim on Fri Dec 4 14:27:33 2020. My first semester as a Computer Science major at USC (Fall 1976), we students used 029 keypunchs. They worked pretty well. I had some experience with the 029 a few years earlier at the University of Illinois. I attended University HS there, which was a laboratory HS affiliated with the U of I. It was across the street from the Digital Computing Lab (DCL), so we'd wander over there and print out some cards with weird shit on them and keep them (they were free). Once I got to USC, I found out you had to pay for punch cards! (Difference between a state University in a majorly blue state, and a private one). Oh well, it was just the one semester, by the Spring 1977 semester, they had installed a PDP-11 machine and instead of punch cards, we entered the programs on CRTs (VT-52) and stored them in our own directories, then compiled. We each had a PPN (I still remember mine [1401,7547] The first number indicated your group (1401 = Computer Science) and the last one was just a number assigned to you). Oh yeah, it was in Octal (Base 8). First semester we used PL/C (the student version of PL/I) Great language, but the compiler was huge (being a student processor, it would try to correct syntax erros if it could (usually incorrectly)). For the second semester and thereafter, we switched to PASCAL. PASCAL was OK, the main thing to remember was when to and when not to end a statement with a ";" PL/C, every statement had a ";", so pretty easy. |
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Re: ibm's magnum opus |
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Posted by pragmatist on Fri Dec 4 14:51:29 2020, in response to Re: ibm's magnum opus, posted by FYBklyn1959 on Fri Dec 4 14:43:12 2020. California was quite a bit more centrist back then. From 1967-1999 a period of 32 years, you had 8 years of Jerry Brown, and 24 years of Republican Governors. Reagan, Deukmejian, and Wilson. |
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Re: ibm's magnum opus |
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Posted by Jeff Rosen on Fri Dec 4 15:32:11 2020, in response to Re: ibm's magnum opus, posted by Stephen Bauman on Fri Dec 4 11:11:35 2020. Didn't Theodore Cleaver mess with a punchcard on a test and Ward got a call from Miss Landers that Beaver was a genius? |
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Re: ibm's magnum opus |
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Posted by Spider-Pig on Fri Dec 4 15:55:02 2020, in response to Re: ibm's magnum opus, posted by Jeff Rosen on Fri Dec 4 15:32:11 2020. So that's where The Simpsons stole that plot from. |
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Re: ibm's magnum opus |
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Posted by Jeff Rosen on Fri Dec 4 16:43:47 2020, in response to Re: ibm's magnum opus, posted by Spider-Pig on Fri Dec 4 15:55:02 2020. Never saw that one but I do remember the Leave it to Beaver episode. |
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Re: ibm's magnum opus |
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Posted by ntrainride on Fri Dec 4 16:47:19 2020, in response to Re: ibm's magnum opus, posted by Fisk Ave Jim on Fri Dec 4 14:27:33 2020. i sincerely bow to your greater wisdom regarding card punch technology. interesting stuff! |
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Re: ibm's magnum opus |
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Posted by Jeff Rosen on Fri Dec 4 17:14:56 2020, in response to Re: ibm's magnum opus, posted by Jeff Rosen on Fri Dec 4 16:43:47 2020. I was wrong. Beaver didn't mess with any punchcard. It was another kid who switched the papers. It was a long time since I last saw the episode. So the Simpsons didn't steal it after all. Here's the episode. I have no idea why the video zooms in and out every few seconds. Certainly wasn't like that on TV!!
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Re: ibm's magnum opus |
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Posted by Bill Newkirk on Fri Dec 4 18:22:09 2020, in response to ibm's magnum opus, posted by ntrainride on Thu Dec 3 21:28:18 2020. Those IBM typewriters were as heavy as the looked.Bill Newkirk |
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Re: ibm's magnum opus |
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Posted by Spider-Pig on Fri Dec 4 20:43:20 2020, in response to Re: ibm's magnum opus, posted by Jeff Rosen on Fri Dec 4 17:14:56 2020. Actually, yes they did. In The Simpsons Bart switched his answer sheet with Martin. |
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Re: ibm's magnum opus |
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Posted by ntrainride on Fri Dec 4 22:54:35 2020, in response to Re: ibm's magnum opus, posted by Jeff Rosen on Fri Dec 4 17:14:56 2020. i think that has to do with bypassing licensing laws, but that's just a guess. |
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Re: ibm's magnum opus |
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Posted by FYBklyn1959 on Fri Dec 4 22:58:15 2020, in response to Re: ibm's magnum opus, posted by pragmatist on Fri Dec 4 14:51:29 2020. Yep, I arrived in September 1976, about halfway through Brown's first term, was there for his 2nd term, 8 years of Deukmejian, and a few months shy of Wilson's 2 terms. Then I moved to Florida, who had had 3 governors since the Civil War (or maybe Reconsrtuction, anyway a long-ass time). The incumbent when I arrived (Lawton Chiles) was a D, but he was term-limited. So that November, Jeb Bush defeated Lt. Gov Buddy McKay and there have only been Republican governors since (Bush 8 years, Crist* 4 years, Scott 8 years and now almost 2 years in for DeSantis).*Crist served the one term, then decided to run for the US Senate. Alas, he lost the Republican primary to Marco Rubio. So he decides to run as an independent, and probably siphoned off enough votes from the Democrat nominee (Congressman Kendrick Meek) to allow Rubio to win. Meanwhile, Crist changes to D and gets the nomination to oppose Scott in 2014, and of course lost. We all know how Olog complains about RINOs, this was one of the few times that he was absolutely right. So I got from 16 straight years (actually 15, as the streak began at the beginning of 1983) of R Governors in CA, to 22 more in FL. meanwhile, in the fall of 1998, Gray Davis, a D, becomes Governor of CA. Reelected in 2002, then recalled in 2003 (If something happened so aggregious that he was recalled in 2003, why the fuck was he reelected in 2002? Californians 🙄 So Ah-nold wins the election to replace Davis, then reelected in 2006, then starting in 2010, Jerry Brown 2.0 (which was a huge comedown from Jerry Brown 1.0 that I experienced for 6 years, probably because this time he wasn't fucking Linda Ronstadt). And now the current idiot Newsome. California sucks. |
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Re: ibm's magnum opus |
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Posted by ntrainride on Fri Dec 4 23:05:04 2020, in response to Re: ibm's magnum opus, posted by Bill Newkirk on Fri Dec 4 18:22:09 2020. i know but those selectrics sure were nice to type on. the name itself, selectric was pure americana, like art deco architecture, the 1939-40 new york world's fair, lightning bolts and "radio powered" painted on locos and even the roaring twenties.seems like only us americans like to come up with such clever nomenclature. |
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Re: ibm's magnum opus |
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Posted by Joe V on Sat Dec 5 10:37:03 2020, in response to Re: ibm's magnum opus, posted by Bill Newkirk on Fri Dec 4 18:22:09 2020. I used to type programs in the APL programming language in a college course on one. It was wired up to a host computer at SUNY Binghamton. |
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Re: ibm's magnum opus |
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Posted by Jeff Rosen on Sat Dec 5 11:07:52 2020, in response to Re: ibm's magnum opus, posted by ntrainride on Fri Dec 4 22:54:35 2020. Every few seconds? That was so annoying. |
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