That new fad - Data Processing

[nurdlinger]

Firedome!

I can't tell you the model, but the equipment is from Digital Equipment Corporation. (DEC) I used several of their minicomputers back in the 70s and 80s. Right now I'm looking at a bus grant continuity card from an 11/34 that I happened to save from oblivion at some point.

 

[firedome]

Ding ding ding!!

Good eye nurdlinger!

Those little Y shaped handles at the back are typical DEC giveaways... this one is in fact a DEC PDP-11/10 circa '71-74ish... one of the last of the "blinkenlights and toggle switch" machines that allowed programmers to input data/instructions manually. Actually used one of these after the IBM programming days when I went back to BioPhysics teaching & research, DECs were used in a lot of labs and academic settings before powerful micros booted them into obscurity. Been looking for one for a very long time, they are getting very hard to find now, most considered hopelessly obsolete and long gone to the scrap heap. Here's the front panel:

 

[firedome]

Closeup:

of front panel... this came from U of MI:

 

[firedome]

Amazingly...

there are still some old DEC PDP machines still controlling nuclear reactors, there's a nuke plant in Canada that plans to finally retire their PDP in... 2040!! Now that's reliable!

 

[turquoisedude]

Gosh, then there WAS a chance I could have found an IT job after all... LOL

 

[58limited]

I love looking at all of this old computer equipment. My dad worked for TI starting in about 1963 and saw the industry evolve from vacuum tubes and punch cards to microsized solid state. He was one of the key engineers who developed laptops for TI (late 1980s) and Compaq (early to mid 1990s).

 

The last time I used a punch card was in Elementary school. I remember the entire first or second grade class sitting in the cafeteria as a teacher walked us through marking cards with our personal data - IIRC (and others here can correct me - my memory might be wrong) we filled in squares with a pencil and a machine punched the marked squares out to make the punch card. That would have been 1975-76 time frame.

 

[whirlcool]

Ah, the good old IBM "mark sense" cards. They had a special reader that could sense where the #2 pencil marks were and punch them out. We used those in college to select our classes for the semester 1971-74. Each class had a card and you marked with a pencil what "section" or time period you wanted the class. In a few days you went by the registration office to pick up your class schedule.

 

[firedome]

Ya, but Paul...

then you'd be glowing in the dark!

Lots of school testing outfits like the College Board (SAT), ACT as well as local schools used those graphite mark sensing cards, our county schools had one of the reading machines.