[TUHS] Re: Corbato dead

Indeed -- and the sounds it made were distinct. Different from ASRxx or 2741's For the younger crew, this made the light and >>so much quieter<< TI Silent 700 of 10 years later such a marvel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_700 ᐧ On Mon, May 8, 2023 at 12:12 PM ron minnich &lt;rminnich(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: > ah, the flexowriter, for those who never saw it, was literally a > typewriter with solenoids at the bottom. I owned one, it was a miracle to > behold. > > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friden_Flexowriter#/media/File:Flexowriter_22… > > On Mon, May 8, 2023 at 7:19 AM Douglas McIlroy < > douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu&gt; wrote: > >> Although it dates from four years ago, MIT's obituary for Corbató was >> still interesting to reread. It couldn't bring itself to mention >> Unix--only the latecomer Linux. It also peddled some mythology about >> Whirlwind from the decade before timesharing. >> >> "Whirlwind was ... a rather clunky machine. Researchers often had >> trouble getting much work done on it, since they had to take turns >> using it for half-hour chunks of time. (Corbató said that it had a >> habit of crashing every 20 minutes or so.)" >> >> "Clunky" perhaps refers to Whirlwind's physical size. It occupied two >> stories of the Barta Building, not counting the rotating AC/DC >> motor-generators in the basement. But it was not ponderous; its clean >> architecture prefigured "RISC" by two decades. >> >> Only a few favored people got "chunks" of (night) time on Whirlwind >> for interactive use. In normal business hours it was run by dedicated >> operators, who fed it user-submitted code on punched paper tape. >> Turnaround time was often as short as an hour--including the >> development of microfilm, the main output medium. Hardware crashes >> were rare--much rarer than experience with vacuum-tube radios would >> lead one to expect--thanks to "marginal testing", in which voltages >> were ramped up and down once a day to smoke out failing tubes before >> they could affect real computing. My recollection is that crashes >> happened on a time scale of days, not minutes. >> >> "Clunky" would better describe the interface of the IBM 704, which >> displaced Whirlwind in about 1956. How backward the 60-year-old >> uppercase-only Hollerith card technology seemed, after the humane full >> Flexowriter font we had enjoyed on Whirlwind. But the 704 had the >> enormous advantages of native floating-point (almost all computing was >> floating-point in those days) and FORTRAN. (Damn those capital >> letters!) >> >> Doug >> >