[87830] in Cypherpunks
Re: [LONG, off-topic]] Interactive Programming
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Frantz)
Tue Oct 7 13:55:15 1997
In-Reply-To: <199710071346.GAA11853@toad.com>
Date: Tue, 7 Oct 1997 10:01:12 -0700
To: "Peter Trei" <trei@process.com>, bcrosby@mncs.k12.mn.us,
cypherpunks@toad.com
From: Bill Frantz <frantz@netcom.com>
Cc: trei@process.com
Reply-To: Bill Frantz <frantz@netcom.com>
Peter - Thanks for a trip down nostalgia road.
At 2:55 AM -0700 10/7/97, Peter Trei wrote:
> I first met Mel when I went to work for Royal McBee Computer
> Corp., a now-defunct subsidiary of the typewriter company. The
> firm manufactured the LGP-30, a small, cheap (by the standards of
> the day) drum-memory computer, and had just started to
> manufacture the RPC-4000, a much-improved, bigger, better, faster
> -- drum-memory computer. Cores cost too much, and weren't here to
> stay, anyway. (That's why you haven't heard of the company, or
> the computer.)
Ah, the third machine I programmed in machine language was a LGP-30. It
brings back fond memories of the not so good old days.
> Mel's job was to re-write
> the blackjack program for the RPC-4000.
> (Port? What does that mean?)
> The new computer had a one-plus-one
> addressing scheme,
> in which each machine instruction,
> in addition to the operation code
> and the address of the needed operand,
> had a second address that indicated where, on the revolving drum,
> the next instruction was located.
My first machine, the IBM 650 had this feature. The last one I saw was in
a technical museum in Vienna.
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