[Coco] George's CNC Machine (WAS: Something else)

[Andrew]

> Message: 3
> Date: Sun, 28 Sep 2008 00:24:03 -0400
> From: richec <rcrislip at neo.rr.com>
> Subject: Re: [Coco] George's CNC Machine (WAS: Something else)
> To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
> Message-ID: <200809280024.04125.rcrislip at neo.rr.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain;  charset="iso-8859-1"
> 
> <snip>
> 
>>Yes!  Back in '77 I watched as a plotter respond to a file  transmitted
>>to it by a program run on an IBM370.   I have my own pen plotter  now
>>which is as close as I will get to a real CNC machine for now due
>>to cost of a good one.   The coco operates the plotter quite  well
>>at 600 baud and is fun to watch.
> 
> <Snip>
> 
> I'll one up ya on that one 8-). I watched a Gerber plotter respond and plot VC 
> and NVA troop concentrations on an 1.75Mhz, 256k RAM, IBM 360 Mod 40 at HQ 
> MACV. With that info the recommendations to send in the B-52s were decided. 
> To keep on topic 8-), I then obtained a job with the local electric company 
> which ran an IBM 360 Mod 50 which ran at 2Mhz and had a whopping 512k of RAM. 
> Do those specs sound familiar? 8-) We took care of all of the company's 
> electrical engineering, accounting, customer billing (2 million of them), and 
> etc. with that machine. Cracks me up that 5 years later my CoCo3 operated 
> with the same specs.

Considering both the 40 and 50 were available from IBM as early as 1964, 
those machines both sound amazing to me. I like to think I am among the 
younger users of this list - I am 35. My parents bought me my first CoCo 
(and my first Rainbow) in 1984. I got my CoCo 3 in 1987. Even so, I have 
always been interested in the history of computing and computers. I 
decided to explore more about the IBM 360 thanks to your recollections:

	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_360
	http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/datacell.html

With the 360, people had the ability to "use the future", 20 years ahead 
of time. I don't know if any graphics displays were created for use with 
a 360, but it would be interesting to find out. After reading about the 
DataCell technology - that is really amazing - up to 3 GB of storage, in 
the mid-1960s!

Things have moved fast - today I can buy a terabyte of storage for much 
less than what my parents paid for my first FD-501 floppy drive. Where 
will things be in another 20 years? It boggles the mind to imagine.

Thank you for inspiring me to go look at the 360 technology again - I am 
always in awe when I study how things were done long before I got into 
computing, and this exploration was no different.

One other thing of note - check out how the 360 was built!

Because the system was designed during that transition stage between 
transistors and ICs, so IBM came up with a different circuit building 
technology that combined an early form of SMT technology with standard 
circuit construction techniques. They created these hybrid-ceramic 
substrate logic modules which were then assembled into larger cartridges 
plugged into the computer's backplane. They did this because they 
weren't certain about the reliability of then-new integrated circuit 
construction.

A similar thing occurred in computing during the transition from relays 
to vacuum tubes, and from tubes to transistors. This is of course just 
the evolution of technology use in computers, but it is always 
interesting to study computer history during these transitions, as 
engineers tend to come up with interesting solutions to computing 
problems during these periods (and usually, we don't see them in common 
use until many years or decades later - which is why today's high-speed 
parallel computing installations give essentially a glimpse of the 
future, at least for me).

Well - enough about reminiscing - I appologize for the thread-jack, but 
this is what the CoCo has ultimately done to me, which is turn me into a 
complete (but hopefully loveable) nerd.

-- Andrew L. Ayers, Glendale, Arizona