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OT: High school drafting class, ~1975

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Phil Kane-2

Re: OT: High school drafting class, ~1975

On 4/26/2021 11:18 AM, Bill Frantz wrote:

>> Or PDP-8 on paper tape after toggling in the boot loader through the
>> front panel switches?

> Sorry, mine was a Varian 620/i (8K of 16 bit words) used for nodes in a
> circuit switched data network (Tymnet). :-)

Memories of a USAF Message Center (mid-1960s) with a 100-line data
switch that took up a whole floor of the building. Today such a switch
would be the size of a big refrigerator.

73 de K2ASP - Phil Kane
Elecraft K2/100 s/n 5402

From a Clearing in the Silicon Forest
Beaverton (Washington County) Oregon

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SteveL

Re: OT: High school drafting class, ~1975

In reply to this post by MIKE ZANE

Sorry,
We are wading through and reminiscing about our early engineering training in the 1960’s and into the 1970’s…

The CRC? A thick book of tables of computed values. If you wanted to know the sine of some value? You could look it up. The same for logarithm, root, other trig functions, and so forth. The book was simply hundreds of pages of math function tables.

A PDP-8 (or 11 or…) were early commercial computers produced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Design was based on simple IC gates of various types - no microprocessors yet. Core memory was based on tiny magnetic beads threaded through with sensing and magnetizing wires.

Disk drives were new in the 60’s and very expensive. A drive the size of a top loading washing machine only held 300MB in the late 70’s. As such, storage like punch cards, punched paper tape, and magnetic tape was widely used. DEC even had a random access tape drive (DEC Tape) that increased utility and speed.

FORTRAN was an early algorithmic programming language that supported equation like statements. It was well suited for math problems - not general data oriented. Your program was written on paper cards punched with holes whose pattern represented letters and numbers. A typewriter like “card punch” facilitated creating these cards. Cards were read into the computer when you wanted to run the program. Program storage was a box you carried your card deck around in. It all seems so primitive now!

I could not afford the HP35 - my first calculator was a TI (Texas Instruments) SR-10. This was 4 functions plus square, square root, and reciprocals. So I carried around the CRC and slide rule as well. This was replaced by an SR-51 which had full trig functions. This was the closest we could imagine as a “personal computer”.

My station? Heathkit HR10b receiver and Ameco AC-1. Novice call signs all included “N” as the second letter. Frequency was crystal controlled.

Steve
aa8af
and once upon a time WN8CYL (which I now wish I could have retained somehow)

> On Apr 26, 2021, at 5:12 PM, MIKE ZANE <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> What the heck are all those things you guys are talking about? Mike n6zw
>> On 04/26/2021 11:18 AM Bill Frantz <[hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
>>
>>
>> OK, I can't resist any longer.
>>
>> On 4/26/21 at 11:33 AM, [hidden email] (SteveL) wrote:
>>
>>> Who carried around a CRC book of tables of various calculations in lieu of an unaffordable scientific calculator?
>> Yup.
>>
>>> Or programming FORTRAN on punch cards?
>> Yup. At first on a IBM 650 with a 4 pass compiler, intermediate
>> storage on punch cards.
>>
>>> Or PDP-8 on paper tape after toggling in the boot loader through the front panel switches?
>> Sorry, mine was a Varian 620/i (8K of 16 bit words) used for
>> nodes in a circuit switched data network (Tymnet). :-)
>>

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MIKE ZANE

Re: OT: High school drafting class, ~1975

I KNEW that would get a response. :) Mike

> On 04/26/2021 8:37 PM SteveL <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>
> Sorry,
> We are wading through and reminiscing about our early engineering training in the 1960’s and into the 1970’s…
>
> The CRC? A thick book of tables of computed values. If you wanted to know the sine of some value? You could look it up. The same for logarithm, root, other trig functions, and so forth. The book was simply hundreds of pages of math function tables.
>
> A PDP-8 (or 11 or…) were early commercial computers produced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Design was based on simple IC gates of various types - no microprocessors yet. Core memory was based on tiny magnetic beads threaded through with sensing and magnetizing wires.
>
> Disk drives were new in the 60’s and very expensive. A drive the size of a top loading washing machine only held 300MB in the late 70’s. As such, storage like punch cards, punched paper tape, and magnetic tape was widely used. DEC even had a random access tape drive (DEC Tape) that increased utility and speed.
>
> FORTRAN was an early algorithmic programming language that supported equation like statements. It was well suited for math problems - not general data oriented. Your program was written on paper cards punched with holes whose pattern represented letters and numbers. A typewriter like “card punch” facilitated creating these cards. Cards were read into the computer when you wanted to run the program. Program storage was a box you carried your card deck around in. It all seems so primitive now!
>
> I could not afford the HP35 - my first calculator was a TI (Texas Instruments) SR-10. This was 4 functions plus square, square root, and reciprocals. So I carried around the CRC and slide rule as well. This was replaced by an SR-51 which had full trig functions. This was the closest we could imagine as a “personal computer”.
>
> My station? Heathkit HR10b receiver and Ameco AC-1. Novice call signs all included “N” as the second letter. Frequency was crystal controlled.
>
> Steve
> aa8af
> and once upon a time WN8CYL (which I now wish I could have retained somehow)
>
>
>
> > On Apr 26, 2021, at 5:12 PM, MIKE ZANE <[hidden email]> wrote:
> >
> > What the heck are all those things you guys are talking about? Mike n6zw
> >> On 04/26/2021 11:18 AM Bill Frantz <[hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >> OK, I can't resist any longer.
> >>
> >> On 4/26/21 at 11:33 AM, [hidden email] (SteveL) wrote:
> >>
> >>> Who carried around a CRC book of tables of various calculations in lieu of an unaffordable scientific calculator?
> >> Yup.
> >>
> >>> Or programming FORTRAN on punch cards?
> >> Yup. At first on a IBM 650 with a 4 pass compiler, intermediate
> >> storage on punch cards.
> >>
> >>> Or PDP-8 on paper tape after toggling in the boot loader through the front panel switches?
> >> Sorry, mine was a Varian 620/i (8K of 16 bit words) used for
> >> nodes in a circuit switched data network (Tymnet). :-)
> >>
>
> ______________________________________________________________
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Mike March

Re: OT: High school drafting class

In reply to this post by Elecraft mailing list

I took 2 years of Drafting in High School (Engineering and Architecture).
At Virginia Tech (VPI at the time), I took all the Engineering Graphics
courses offered even though I was not an engineering student.

I taught high school drafting for the next 31 years and I now teach
AutoCAD, Inventor and Revit at a community college.

--
Michael March
242 Clay Hill Dr.
Winchester, VA 22602
[hidden email]
540-539-8500 cell
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Doug Person-4

Re: OT: High school drafting class, ~1975

In reply to this post by Elecraft mailing list

Fascinating walk through the past. I took mechanical drawing in my
freshman year. Our high school was 4 years and no junior high.
Mechanical drawing was by far my favorite class. I learned a lot about
dimensions, angles, areas - basic geometry. It made math make sense.

My first novice station in 1962 was a Halicrafters S38E receiver which
was terrible and a one-tube transmitter built from salvaged TV parts
that was in the 1962 ARRL Handbook - which I still have complete with
burn marks when I dropped the soldering iron on it. My father gave me
a Lafayette HE-10 receiver for Christmas that year. It was much better.

Ham radio and my familiarity with electronic circuits led me to a class
in Autocoder, an assembly language for an IBM computer from the 60's. I
don't recall what model. But - bits and bytes made perfect sense because
to me they were just a series of switches and the logic of ANDs, ORs,
XORs, etc were easy for me to visualize. I just thought of current
making its way through a matrix of on or off switches. I proceeded to
take ever computer class offered in that community college.

Although there have been many working titles for someone who writes
code, and I've had about a dozen, I've always been proud to call myself
a computer programmer. Nothing more and nothing less.

73, Doug -- K0DXV

On 4/26/2021 2:19 PM, John Saxon via Elecraft wrote:

> I have greatly enjoyed the memory fest here. Wasn't going to join in, but, Steve, your email really hit close to home. I replied to Steve, intended for whole group.
>
> Took 'Mechanical Drawing' in Jr. high, loved it. Also had drawing classes (course also included slide rule) first semester of college.
>
> I was a co-op student in EE and worked for NASA 1962-1967. I was placed in a software group, kinda out of my degree, but I liked it and spent my career as a Software Engineer (in the day we were called 'programmers.')
> I was greatly blessed to be working at NASA at the beginning of operations in Houston. The first computer I worked on was an IBM 7094, 32K of 36 bit words, 2 microsecond cycle time, mag tape OS, no disk. We were located in what had been the PBS TV studio on the University of Houston campus, reworked to be a computer center - the space center (MSC) was under construction. Languages were FORTRAN II, assembly (FAP) and eventually FORTRAN IV and assembly. Punch cards of course.
> Slide rules indeed! However, we also had a Friden mechanical calculator which could do square roots!!
>
> Ham rig at the time was a homebrew 6AU6-6146 from a QST article and Hallicrafters S-19R with Heathkit Q multiplier, dipole on 40m cw.
> As you, Steve, indicated I could not afford the HP 'digital slide rule' -- bought the TI version about a year later for a cost 1/2 of the HP, used it for years. Still have my K&E DECI-LON (and a B-29 'Load Adjuster' slide rule from WWII).
> I remember all the items you mentioned.
> Finally (at last) I often tell younger folks (I am 77) that they have orders of magnitude more power in their cell phones than we had in our gigantic computers -- BUT -- we put men on the moon with 'em.
> Sorry for the wide bandwidth,73,John K5ENQ
>
>
>
> On Monday, April 26, 2021, 10:36:33 AM CDT, SteveL <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> I envied a friend in a EE program and the University of Cincinnati. He had the first HP-35 I’d ever seen the year it was introduced (1972), but it was way out of my budget as a new freshman studying Engineering.
>
> A couple of months after my friend acquired the HP-35, to my fascination he received a letter from HP detailing a list of obscure calculations the device performed in error (the tangent of 98.2352…, etc.) . The letter went on to describe that these were determined and then verified by computer simulation of the computational algorithms used internally - a concept new to this budding engineer. And, if he returned the calculator, it would be repaired and corrected.
>
> And to think we basically flew to the moon on a slide rule? Who could ever imagine a computer that could fit into one room? (Paraphrasing a line from early in the Apollo 13 movie.)
>
> Who carried around a CRC book of tables of various calculations in lieu of an unaffordable scientific calculator?
> Or programming FORTRAN on punch cards?
> Or PDP-8 on paper tape after toggling in the boot loader through the front panel switches?
>
> We’ve come a long way! I love the reminiscences…
>
> Steve
> aa8af
>
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n0tt1

Re: OT: High school drafting class

In reply to this post by Elecraft mailing list

OK, so I gotta chime in and tell this brief story....
Circa 1958, HS mechanical drawing class. Some kid
was screwing off. Distruptive! Mr Gersic, went back to the kid,
picked him up off his stool by the seat of his pants/belt with one hand,
the other
on his shoulder, and carried him out door. Never saw the kid in class
again!! :D)

Charlie, N0TT

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Buck

Re: OT: High school drafting class

In those days, there was no such thing as ADHD. You got whacked on the
back of the head until you paid attention.

k4ia, Buck
K3s# 11497
Honor Roll 8B DXCC
EasyWayHamBooks.com

On 4/27/2021 6:22 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

> OK, so I gotta chime in and tell this brief story....
> Circa 1958, HS mechanical drawing class. Some kid
> was screwing off. Distruptive! Mr Gersic, went back to the kid,
> picked him up off his stool by the seat of his pants/belt with one hand,
> the other
> on his shoulder, and carried him out door. Never saw the kid in class
> again!! :D)
>
> Charlie, N0TT
>
> ______________________________________________________________
> Elecraft mailing list
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> Post: mailto:[hidden email]
>
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>

Phil Kane-2

Re: OT: High school drafting class

In reply to this post by n0tt1

On 4/27/2021 3:22 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

> OK, so I gotta chime in and tell this brief story.... Circa 1958, HS
> mechanical drawing class. Some kid was screwing off. Distruptive!
> Mr Gersic, went back to the kid, picked him up off his stool by the
> seat of his pants/belt with one hand, the other on his shoulder, and
> carried him out door. Never saw the kid in class again!! :D)

Try doing that today and the lawsuits will go on until the kid is out of
college (paid for by the school district, of course). :)

73 de K2ASP - Phil Kane
Elecraft K2/100 s/n 5402

From a Clearing in the Silicon Forest
Beaverton (Washington County) Oregon

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Tom Azlin W7SUA-2

Re: OT: High school drafting class, ~1975

In reply to this post by Mark Musick

Have a slice of a core memory module here. ... somewhere.

Of course took drafting and electronics in high school as well as wood shop.

First computer I used was an IBM 1130. Learned how to build a machine
language initial boot card where the 12 hole positions in a column could
give me 80 short instructions from which I could build a few 16 bit
instructions and yank in the remainder of the cards in the stack. And
program by hand with the front panel switches. But also rewrote the
keyboard and rotate/tilt code for the Selectric printer as interrupt
driven.

Much easier these days.

73, tom w7sua

On 4/26/2021 2:33 PM, Mark Musick wrote:
> OK, I can't resist any longer either.
> I waited and bought the HP-45 when it came out. It had hyperbolic functions as well as polar to rectangular conversion functions. Being a EE the polar to rectangular conversion is why I bought it. It made life much easier. Of course my dad had a fit when he found out what I paid for it.
>
> Now to the computers, how many of you youngsters out there remember core memory? For you really young folks there was no RAM. 0s and 1s were stored on toroidal cores on a back plane.
> IN 1978, when I started at Public Service Company of Indiana (PSI), the local electric utility, we were using two 16 bit MODCOMP minicomputers. Each minicomputer had 64K of core memory for the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system. Each machine had a tape drive and two 360k disk drives. We thought we were downtown. The SCADA system was used to control and monitor the HV transmission system. 69kV - 765kV.
>
> 73,
> Mark, WB9CIF
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Elecraft mailing list

Re: OT: High school drafting class

In reply to this post by Buck

In my elementary school and high school (Saginaw, MI) all male teachers had a paddle of some sort. They never used it but appointed a student to administer the “whacks” in front of the class. Very effective. I graduated in 1963.

Dave K8WPE since 1960

David J. Wilcox’s iPad

> On Apr 27, 2021, at 9:41 PM, Buck <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> In those days, there was no such thing as ADHD. You got whacked on the back of the head until you paid attention.
>
> k4ia, Buck
> K3s# 11497
> Honor Roll 8B DXCC
> EasyWayHamBooks.com
>
>> On 4/27/2021 6:22 PM, [hidden email] wrote:
>> OK, so I gotta chime in and tell this brief story....
>> Circa 1958, HS mechanical drawing class. Some kid
>> was screwing off. Distruptive! Mr Gersic, went back to the kid,
>> picked him up off his stool by the seat of his pants/belt with one hand,
>> the other
>> on his shoulder, and carried him out door. Never saw the kid in class
>> again!! :D)
>> Charlie, N0TT
>> ______________________________________________________________
>> Elecraft mailing list
>> Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft
>> Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm
>> Post: mailto:[hidden email]
>> This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net
>> Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
>> Message delivered to [hidden email]
> ______________________________________________________________
> Elecraft mailing list
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>
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> Message delivered to [hidden email]

123