[TUHS] Corbato dead

[ron minnich]

oh no, it was literally a typewriter, old school,  no selectric ball.
https://youtu.be/4HfaveA_NE0?t=365

On Mon, May 8, 2023 at 3:06 PM Rich Salz <rich.salz at gmail.com> wrote:

> It was basically a selectric on top of a box with little hooks. It pulled
> each key right?
>
> On Mon, May 8, 2023, 2:47 PM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
>
>> Indeed -- and the sounds it made were distinct.   Different from ASRxx or
>> 2741's
>>
>> For the younger crew, this made the light and >>so much quieter<< TI
>> Silent 700 of 10 years later such a marvel:
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_700
>> ᐧ
>>
>> On Mon, May 8, 2023 at 12:12 PM ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> ah, the flexowriter, for those who never saw it, was literally a
>>> typewriter with solenoids at the bottom. I owned one, it was a miracle to
>>> behold.
>>>
>>>
>>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friden_Flexowriter#/media/File:Flexowriter_2201_Programatic.jpg
>>>
>>> On Mon, May 8, 2023 at 7:19 AM Douglas McIlroy <
>>> douglas.mcilroy at dartmouth.edu> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Although it dates from four years ago, MIT's obituary for Corbató was
>>>> still interesting to reread. It couldn't bring itself to mention
>>>> Unix--only the latecomer Linux. It also peddled some mythology about
>>>> Whirlwind from the decade before timesharing.
>>>>
>>>> "Whirlwind was ... a rather clunky machine. Researchers often had
>>>> trouble getting much work done on it, since they had to take turns
>>>> using it for half-hour chunks of time. (Corbató said that it had a
>>>> habit of crashing every 20 minutes or so.)"
>>>>
>>>> "Clunky" perhaps refers to Whirlwind's physical size. It occupied two
>>>> stories of the Barta Building, not counting the rotating AC/DC
>>>> motor-generators in the basement. But it was not ponderous; its clean
>>>> architecture prefigured "RISC" by two decades.
>>>>
>>>> Only a few favored people got "chunks" of (night) time on Whirlwind
>>>> for interactive use. In normal business hours it was run by dedicated
>>>> operators, who fed it user-submitted code on punched paper tape.
>>>> Turnaround time was often as short as an hour--including the
>>>> development of microfilm, the main output medium. Hardware crashes
>>>> were rare--much rarer than experience with vacuum-tube radios would
>>>> lead one to expect--thanks to "marginal testing", in which voltages
>>>> were ramped up and down once a day to smoke out failing tubes before
>>>> they could affect real computing. My recollection is that crashes
>>>> happened on a time scale of days, not minutes.
>>>>
>>>> "Clunky" would better describe the interface of the IBM 704, which
>>>> displaced Whirlwind in about 1956. How backward the 60-year-old
>>>> uppercase-only Hollerith card technology seemed, after the humane full
>>>> Flexowriter font we had enjoyed on Whirlwind. But the 704 had the
>>>> enormous advantages of native floating-point (almost all computing was
>>>> floating-point in those days) and FORTRAN. (Damn those capital
>>>> letters!)
>>>>
>>>> Doug
>>>>
>>>
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