What’s interesting is how long some of these technologies stuck around after they were clearly obsolete. When I was in college in the late ‘80s, we were still being taught how to solve differential equations on analog computers. I don’t need no stinkin’ Matlab, I’ve got patch cables and an o-scope.
Back when I was taking computers solutions of differential equations in the mid seventies they demonstrated solving differential equations using an analog computer, but we weren’t taught it as a practical technique. It was more interesting that we could simulate analog circuitry using differential equations.
[quote=“Gary “Wombat” Robson, post:95, topic:597248”]
Oh, my. I had forgotten all about those. And the horrible pain in the neck when a connection was wrong and you had to unwrap the bottom wire on the pin, slide the others down, and rewrap the new one.
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Been there, done that. Usually, it was easier to unwrap all the wires, then re-wrap them. The powered wrapping tool would wrap them so tight that they couldn’t slide down easily.
No. The one small luxury we had was bundles of pre-stripped wires of different lengths. But, inevitably, we had to make huge numbers of custom lengths.
What do folks use to prototype circuits now, if wirewrap is obsolete?
Two of my earliest jobs were down the old fashioned way. An elderly and eccentric neighbor lady wanted her lawn (fortunately a small lawn) mowed with her antique push mower. It took me about an hour when a gas push mower would have taken about 15-20 minutes. She payed me accordingly. Her son taught be how to sharpen the blades. That lawn did look beautiful.
And I worked for a family friend while “sugaring”. Making maple syrup. They had draft horses drawing a big hopper of sap through the maple orchard. The “Grunts” (like me) had to go get the buckets off the tree and haul them back to the hopper. 10-20 yds. ~3 gal buckets. 2-3 ft deep snow. (uphill both ways)
Ah yes, I’d forgoten push mowers. I cut my teeth on one, so to speak.
Horses are still used in those instances because they will cause less damage in the woods, and they can sometimes go places normal vehicles wouldn’t try.
Very cool link! Thanks.
In case you are interested in how it works…you put a stack of checks in the hopper just above the two keypads, face up. As you read each check, you punch in the dollar amount on the smaller, 10-key pad, and press one of the 32 buttons on the left one according to which group you want the check to be sorted with. [sup]*[/sup] Then, pressing the large “enter” button with your right hand, simultaneously feed the check into the maw with your left hand. The internal drum spins around to present the desired group hopper to the maw, and the check is inserted into that group behind the others already in that hopper.
The numerical total is added to the grand accumulator, and also added to one of the 32 adding machine tapes at the rear corresponding to the group you selected.
When you are done (or when one of the hoppers gets full), you open the hatch at the left and extract a pile of checks from each hopper. The appropriate adding machine tape is placed on the pile and held together by a rubber band, then the counter for that group is zeroed out. The checks are in the exact order of the machine tape printout.
As sophisticated (?!) as that sounds, the machine could only add, not subtract. You corrected errors by subtracting by using 9’s. To subtract 14.00, you did some mental arithmetic and added 999999986.00, which caused the counters to overflow and “add” the amount. One advantage to this was any corrections would stand out on the tape since they had a long row of 9’s.
Our bank used one machine to sort incoming checks – ones drawn on our bank – by the bookkeeper who handled that particular group according to the account name. A thru C names, D-G names, etc. After a batch from the clearing house was processed thru the proof machine, the total on our tape had to match the total on the clearing house’s tape. If they didn’t, you had to place the two tapes side by side and compare each entry until you found the difference.
This machine had a neat feature that I discovered by reading the manual. After you entered a whole bunch of checks, you could enter the expected total and say “balance”. The machine would compare the numbers and allow you to proceed only if they matched (otherwise, the operator had to compare them manually and not make a mistake).
This feature never worked reliably on our machines, and the serviceman was unable to make it work well enough to use. The problem stemmed from a grid of pins that was pressed against a metal plate. If they all made contact, the machine said the numbers matched, but mechanical things being what they are, a speck of dust or a pin bent ever-so-slightly often prevented a solid contact, the machine said it didn’t balance and we were stuck (no override). So we discarded use of that feature.
I miss my proof machine!
[sup]*[/sup]Now that I think about it, we punched the sort button first, then the numbers. It took a fraction of a second for the drum to spin to the right hopper, so by the time you had the numbers entered, it was ready to accept the check; otherwise you had to wait for the drum to get there. And you programmed the hopper selections so the most frequent operations were between nearby hoppers and the delay would be short. Maybe a quarter of a second for each long delay, but they added up.
I wrote software by punching it into cards. I did this in the late 80s. it was government work and the military was still using old technology for some things.
At a summer job at a bookstore in the original NY Times building at 41 Park Row, NY, I used a 1920s era cash register that was covered with beautiful chased metal swirls, had little metal numbers that went up and down as you added up, and made a merry ringing sound-effect sound when I rang up sales. Which I didn’t do often enough to prevent the place from closing down at the end of the summer. Just as well, the attitudes towards female employees and wages pretty much were 1920s era* too. Those bastards still owe me 55 bucks for my last paycheck from 1984.
- It’s late and I can’t think of a good in-joke, feel free!
Paste Up and Typesetting here also, just prior to Desk top Publishing. :rolleyes: