Where should the type information be: in tags and descriptors 436
Want the long list or the short one? Here are some that I know about for certain, various time frames from 1960 to 1980. DOS, DOS...
+--------------- B ? Why B instead of U ? +---------------
I forgot. (It *was* back in 1965, after all.) I *think* it had something to do with the kind of tape drive. I do remember that the "L" was a "load mode" read, which meant that group-marks-word-marks in memory would be wiped out by whatever was on the tape which is what you'd want when cold-booting a system. And I *think* the "%" specified which I-O channel. And the first "0" was certainly the tape unit number. But I forget what the "B" was. sorry.
+--------------- Isn't easier to just hit the TAPE LOAD button if there was one? +---------------
There wasn't one.
+--------------- I don't know as I never actually saw a 1410-7010, just a 1401 with disks. +---------------
Yeah, we had no disks on that 1410, just 5 (6?) tapes, a (1402?) card reader-punch, a 1403 printer, and a Calcomp drum plotter connected to a "communications controller" port. And the console Selectric typewrite, of course.
+--------------- On a 1401, you couldn't change location 0, so the equivalent instruction would have been: L%U0009RN starting at location 1, with W-M's on the first and last chars. +---------------
Interesting. That's probably what they used when they booted it in "1401 mode". Yes, that happened occasionally, specifically, because the AutoPlotter software to make nice pretty graphs & stuff only ran in 1401 mode. But nobody wanted to tie up the machine for the hour or more it might take to draw a complex plot, so if you had some honking Fortran program that generated a bunch of data you wanted to plot, the management-mandated sequence was:
1. Boot the machine in 1410 mode.
Eh? Would it help to know that I wired adding machines? Or worked on 5-bit KSR's and wrote...
2. Run your Fortran program, writing the output to a scratch tape.
3. Boot the machine in 1401 mode.
4. Run 1401 AutoPlotter controlled by a deck of cards, redirecting its input to the tape with your data on it, and writing a "plot image" another scratch tape.
5. Boot the machine back up in 1410 mode.
6. Start SPOOLing the "plot image" tape to the plotter. Remember, "SPOOL" == "Simultaneous Peripheral On-Off-Line", that is, printing or other I-O while doing something else. Primitive multi-taking.
7. Run some other heavy Fortran number-crunching production job while your plot is SPOOLing to the plotter...
-Rob
----- San Mateo, CA 94403 (650)572-2607
Where should the type information be: in tags and descriptors 437
Alt Folklore Computers from Newsgroups
Where should the type information be: in tags and descriptors 435