Hi,
Ask someone else about the Gus Germain story ..
Ask me about the time I hung behind the door across from the
Red Room reading a program listing while Marj Kohli was giving
a tour to some Chinese folks (I was hanging by my gravity boots :-)
Patrick
well, you could ask Jim about how much he appreciated those glass
walls above him ..
... or they time Hurley made plaster in the DCS coffee pot plastic
jug ...
... or ask Cressman about the rat that lives under the floor ..
... or Mr. Nice and Mr. Grump the two janitors ... Mr. Grump got
fired for hiding bottles above the DCS coffee room.
... or how Hurley (when he lived alone) used to watch cable TV in
the CC80 room :-)
I know nothing.
Patrick
I worked as a summer High School student for the Computing Centre in 1969 & 1970.
(Started as an EE student in Sept. 1970.)
I was there the day the floor was broken by a man in a Texan hat.
He was wheeling in a large box to replace the ECS (Extended Core Storage).
Manufactured by Ampex(?) it upped ECS from 1 Meg to 2Megs giving the
Model /75 a grand total of 3 megabytes of main memory.
As I was told, it would be free 'if' Waterloo could figure out how to
allow the high speed fixed head drum to read/write directly out of ECS.
Previously, as the memory was too slow, 64K of main memory was reserved
for an I/O and copy operation (I/O to main memory and copy between it and ECS).
This Texan (I was told he was from Texas, as I remember) was using a 2-wheeled
cart and somewhere near the main console (just to the right, off frame of the
photo), he broke a floor tile. I happened to be in a room on the 2nd floor overlooking
the Red Room when this happened. Though I don't remember actually seeing it
happen, I do remember seeing him holding the box and struggling to keep it from
falling over. It probably broke a tile that was cut to house the main console (not
the light board left of center on photo, the console mostly cut off, front right).
How big was the box? Look at the picture on the main Red Room website.
It was easily as big as the one on the front left though it's position was the
front right of the CPU. (I cannot say if it is that box from the '74 photo.)
BTW: Waterloo's Engineering Dept. did figure out how to fix the box.
It seems there was one internal hardware register that was used for both
input and output to the memory. By creating a separate register for each
direction, the memory was able to go fast enough to handle the high speed
disk. (I don't know if the fix had to go into the CPU or the Ampex Memory Box)
ANOTHER STORY
When all the lights turned on
If you look at the 360/75 in any photo you see a very large light bank.
This is the diagnostic console (not the main operator console).
It was really only used when there was a problem.
The lights on this console would flash following the various control points
they were attached to like the PSW (Processor Status Word), Instruction
Pointer, Data word, I/O control and information, etc. But, unless you
pressed the 'Lamp Test' button you would NEVER see all the lights turn
on at once. Nothing would/could 'peg it'. Well, nothing with one exception.
To start the machine up, you usually loaded a special deck of cards into
a card reader and pressed the load button. This would load the boot
programme that would load the OS, etc. Well, a couple of programmers
(one was or became a CS professor) decided to write a boot programme.
They did this before the computer arrived and planned on using it before
the machine was officially commissioned.
What was it? A Prime number Generator using the Sieve of Aristophanes.
They wrote it to be OS-less so that all (most) of memory could be a large
bit array that the Sieve code would walk to remove non-primes. Once done,
the bit array was walked again to print out the results.
So, the binary 'boot' cards were placed in the hopper, read in, and then
all (most) of the lights on the Maintenance Console shone bright for a few
seconds (8 I think I was told) and then the printer started. It printed for
about ½ hour (or something like that) printing all the primes to some million.
When the System 360/75 was upgraded to 3 Megabytes, they went in and
ran the programme again.
I was not involved in this effort, only told it by one of the authors and, I
did see the printout.