Well, thats my first post out of the way. So now you know I am a total nurd, and that doesn’t bother me one bit !
What am I going to write about next ?
Back in the 1970’s, I spent a lot of time working with a couple of computers that dated from the late 50’s/early 60’s. I suppose you would call them ‘mainframes’ today because of their size, but as mainframes go, the machines I worked with were not that large compared to others.
One of those computers was the IBM 1620 which was an inexpensive computer intended for scientific work, and it was released at the end of 1959. So by the time I got my hands on it, it was already old and obsolete.
Nevertheless, I learned a lot from that computer, and recently became interested in emulating it on a PC. I discovered that the ‘SimH’ project contains an emulator for the 1620, and that began a battle to get the simulator up and running and doing something useful.
I now have the IBM Monitor 1 system installed on a virtual 1311 disk pack, and have succeeded in compiling/assembling Fortran & SPS programs and running them.
It took quite a while to get it all going, and I am currently writing it all up for my next post. In fact, it may be split over into several posts.
Till next time – The Old IT Guy (UK)
