On 08/12/2023 19:16, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> I worked at that service bureau on those days, while during
> the rest of the week my disenchantment with Computer Science deepened,
> and I discovered that theoretical math really wasn't my forte.
> At the end of my third year (a disaster aside from the programming
> part), I dropped out, went on full time with the service bureau,
> and have been programming real-world applications ever since.

Yes. Computer science is relatively speaking bollocks. Software
engineering however is extremely valuable

--
Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have
guns, why should we let them have ideas?

Josef Stalin

On Fri, 8 Dec 2023 17:04:08 +0000
The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

> On 08/12/2023 16:51, TimS wrote:
> > On 08 Dec 2023 at 13:02:43 GMT, "Martin Gregorie"
> > <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:
> >
> >> Learnt Algol 60 at uni where I was using the University's only
> >> student computer (Elliott 503 - look THAT up!)
> >
> > The one I used was at Imperial. Where was yours?
> >
> I think Cambridge had one.

Nope. In my day there was a 370 and a Sigma 6 (engineering
department), I missed Titan by a few years.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency

On 8 Dec 2023 16:51:10 GMT, TimS wrote:

> On 08 Dec 2023 at 13:02:43 GMT, "Martin Gregorie"
> <martin@mydomain.invalid>
> wrote:
>
>> Learnt Algol 60 at uni where I was using the University's only student
>> computer (Elliott 503 - look THAT up!)
>
> The one I used was at Imperial. Where was yours?

Victoria University of Wellington (NZ).

From memory ours had 32 KB main memory and another 32Kb, in a separate
cabinet, that operated as fast disk store: After it was booted, all
standard executables and, IIRC the Algol standard library, were loaded
into it. Any unoccupied space in it could also be used as a sort of paged
memory for holding and operating on large arrays.

It had a line printer as well as paper tape readers and punches. By the
last time I saw it, it had acquired four 1/2" inch mag tape drives,
mainly, I think, because it booted faster off mag tape and anyway, I'd
imagine that would be more resistant to wear & tear than paper tape,

--

Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org

On 08 Dec 2023 at 23:12:30 GMT, "Martin Gregorie" <martin@mydomain.invalid>
wrote:

> On 8 Dec 2023 16:51:10 GMT, TimS wrote:
>
>> On 08 Dec 2023 at 13:02:43 GMT, "Martin Gregorie"
>> <martin@mydomain.invalid>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Learnt Algol 60 at uni where I was using the University's only student
>>> computer (Elliott 503 - look THAT up!)
>>
>> The one I used was at Imperial. Where was yours?
>
> Victoria University of Wellington (NZ).
>
> From memory ours had 32 KB main memory and another 32Kb, in a separate
> cabinet, that operated as fast disk store: After it was booted, all
> standard executables and, IIRC the Algol standard library, were loaded
> into it. Any unoccupied space in it could also be used as a sort of paged
> memory for holding and operating on large arrays.
>
> It had a line printer as well as paper tape readers and punches. By the
> last time I saw it, it had acquired four 1/2" inch mag tape drives,
> mainly, I think, because it booted faster off mag tape and anyway, I'd
> imagine that would be more resistant to wear & tear than paper tape,

Luxury. We had perhaps 8k of store and the only I/O device was a paper tape
read/punch. The machine was in fact an 803 (I misread your OP) and so slow
that it couldn't drive the reader at full speed. And it only had autocode - no
Algol.

It supposedly was intended for use by the optics group in the Physics dept,
for ray tracing, but we undergrads who had some slight interest in Astronomy
wanted to use it for orbit calculations, but we didnt really know how.

--
Tim

The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> writes:
> These were not despised as the product of 'white male science', nor
> yet were they dismissed as irrelevant or socially dangerous. They were
> seen as triumphs of traditional education and bloody hard work.

You should spend less time paying attention to culture war nonsense.

--
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/

On 09/12/2023 08:56, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
> The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> writes:
>> These were not despised as the product of 'white male science', nor
>> yet were they dismissed as irrelevant or socially dangerous. They were
>> seen as triumphs of traditional education and bloody hard work.
>
> You should spend less time paying attention to culture war nonsense.
>
It is very hard not to be overwhelmed by it Richard.

When every single part of your life is affected by it.

Frankly I feel your comment feels like saying to a 1930s German Jew 'you
should pay less attention to that national socialist nonsense'.

--
Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have
guns, why should we let them have ideas?

Josef Stalin

On 09 Dec 2023 at 09:59:37 GMT, "The Natural Philosopher"
<tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

> On 09/12/2023 08:56, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
>> The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> writes:
>>> These were not despised as the product of 'white male science', nor
>>> yet were they dismissed as irrelevant or socially dangerous. They were
>>> seen as triumphs of traditional education and bloody hard work.
>>
>> You should spend less time paying attention to culture war nonsense.
>>
> It is very hard not to be overwhelmed by it Richard.
>
> When every single part of your life is affected by it.
>
> Frankly I feel your comment feels like saying to a 1930s German Jew 'you
> should pay less attention to that national socialist nonsense'.

Or those Israeli women near the Gaza border on 7th Oct whom Hamas "fighters"
raped, murdered and mutilated (not necessarily in that order). Perhaps they
should have paid less attention to culture war nonsense.

See, it's like the naive ones of the 60s. Remember them? And how they said
that peace would prevail and there wouldn't be another war "because we won't
turn up". The jews of the 1930s didn't "turn up", nor did those women.

You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.

--
Tim

On 09/12/2023 10:14, TimS wrote:
> On 09 Dec 2023 at 09:59:37 GMT, "The Natural Philosopher"
> <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>
>> On 09/12/2023 08:56, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
>>> The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> writes:
>>>> These were not despised as the product of 'white male science', nor
>>>> yet were they dismissed as irrelevant or socially dangerous. They were
>>>> seen as triumphs of traditional education and bloody hard work.
>>>
>>> You should spend less time paying attention to culture war nonsense.
>>>
>> It is very hard not to be overwhelmed by it Richard.
>>
>> When every single part of your life is affected by it.
>>
>> Frankly I feel your comment feels like saying to a 1930s German Jew 'you
>> should pay less attention to that national socialist nonsense'.
>
> Or those Israeli women near the Gaza border on 7th Oct whom Hamas "fighters"
> raped, murdered and mutilated (not necessarily in that order). Perhaps they
> should have paid less attention to culture war nonsense.
>
> See, it's like the naive ones of the 60s. Remember them? And how they said
> that peace would prevail and there wouldn't be another war "because we won't
> turn up". The jews of the 1930s didn't "turn up", nor did those women.
>
I met a Vietnam Vet in the 1970s. He and his college chums didnt 'turn
up' either. They were told to go down holes in the ground and shoot Viet
Cong. They refused. The Viet Cong repaid him by blowing his legs off
with a land mine.

> You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.
>
Sadly yes. I wasn't too interested in working on war electronics. And
yet a missile I had a teeny little part in developing shot down cruise
missiles in the Falklands and saved UK lives.

My problem is that very early on I got sucked into the culture wars. A
sort of friend at College saw me as ideal material for the communist
party. He told me their 50 year plan.
"It will be the long march through the institutions: we will join every
union, every public sector organisation, every school, university and
media company, and we will teach communism, though we will call it
socialism, and we will destroy the state from within so we can replace
it with a Marxist one".

And they have succeeded.

--
Any fool can believe in principles - and most of them do!

On 9 Dec 2023 08:53:19 GMT, TimS wrote:

> Luxury. We had perhaps 8k of store and the only I/O device was a paper
> tape read/punch. The machine was in fact an 803 (I misread your OP) and
> so slow that it couldn't drive the reader at full speed. And it only had
> autocode - no Algol.
>
The Elliott 503 preceeded the 803: I've seen 803s in NMOC but never seen
one running.

The 503 was physically huge, being four cabinets, each about the same size
as a two-door wardrobe, an engineers monitoring panel which was about 4
feet by 3 feet, a lineprinter, two paper tape readers, two paper tape
punches and a control console. The latter was a small desk with keyboard
and teletype-style printer inset flush with the desktop. IIRC had two

It used 39 bit ferrite core memory and needed those big cabinets because
the logic was built from discrete transistors, so the 503 must have been
one of the first transistorised computers.

--

Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org

On 09/12/2023 12:39, Martin Gregorie wrote:
> On 9 Dec 2023 08:53:19 GMT, TimS wrote:
>
>> Luxury. We had perhaps 8k of store and the only I/O device was a paper
>> tape read/punch. The machine was in fact an 803 (I misread your OP) and
>> so slow that it couldn't drive the reader at full speed. And it only had
>> autocode - no Algol.
>>
> The Elliott 503 preceeded the 803: I've seen 803s in NMOC but never seen
> one running.
>
> The 503 was physically huge, being four cabinets, each about the same size
> as a two-door wardrobe, an engineers monitoring panel which was about 4
> feet by 3 feet, a lineprinter, two paper tape readers, two paper tape
> punches and a control console. The latter was a small desk with keyboard
> and teletype-style printer inset flush with the desktop. IIRC had two
>
> It used 39 bit ferrite core memory and needed those big cabinets because
> the logic was built from discrete transistors, so the 503 must have been
> one of the first transistorised computers.
>
>
Transistors had been around at least 10 years prior to its introduction.

The late 60s had them cheap enough for 'transistor radios' to be the
i-pods of their time.

"Following the invention of the transistor in 1947—which revolutionized
the field of consumer electronics by introducing small but powerful,
convenient hand-held devices—the Regency TR-1 was released in 1954
becoming the first commercial transistor radio. The mass-market success
of the smaller and cheaper Sony TR-63, released in 1957, led to the
transistor radio becoming the most popular electronic communication
device of the 1960s and 1970s.¨
So building a 'puter out of DTL or RTL using discrete semiconductors was
utterly feasible in the the late 1950s. Slow, extremely bulky and pretty
power hungry, but feasible.

"In January of 1954, supported by the military, engineers from Bell Labs
built the first computer without vacuum tubes. Known as TRADIC (for
TRAnsistorized DIgital Computer), the machine was a mere three cubic
feet, a mind-boggling size when compared with the 1000 square feet ENIAC
hogged. It contained almost 800 point-contact transistors and 10,000
germanium crystal rectifiers. It could perform a million logical
operations every second, still not quite as fast as the vacuum tube
computers of the day, but pretty close. And best of all, it operated on
less than 100 watts of power. ¨

--
Karl Marx said religion is the opium of the people.
But Marxism is the crack cocaine.

On Fri, 08 Dec 2023 19:16:38 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

>
> I've always said that this will be the epitaph of our society (spoken in
> a nasal whine, of course).
>
>> The prime example of how not to do all of the above correctly is the UK
>> Post Office Horizon screw-up.
>
> Is that anything like the Canadian Phoenix federal payroll screw-up?
>
I don't know about that one, but for sheer venality, bad management,
incompetence, (seeming lack of) and purely incompetent system design and
development and swindling the users this easily takes the biscuit.

Private Eye published a good description of the scandal:

https://www.private-eye.co.uk/special-reports/justice-lost-in-the-post

and BBC's Radio 4 also has an excellent series on it, but the scandal
(which would seem to involve management and staff at all levels in the UK
Post Offoce and Fujitsu isn't done and dusted yet.

> Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but
> when there is nothing left to take away.
> -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
>
Indeed: another interesting example of cockup by carelessness turns out to
be the recent delivery of samples from the Bennu:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/12/nasas-asteroid-mission-struck-its-
target-but-then-dodged-a-bullet/2/

--

Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org

On Sat, 9 Dec 2023 12:56:06 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> So building a 'puter out of DTL or RTL using discrete semiconductors was
> utterly feasible in the the late 1950s. Slow, extremely bulky and pretty
> power hungry, but feasible.
>
> "In January of 1954, supported by the military, engineers from Bell Labs
> built the first computer without vacuum tubes. Known as TRADIC (for
> TRAnsistorized DIgital Computer), the machine was a mere three cubic
> feet, a mind-boggling size when compared with the 1000 square feet ENIAC
> hogged. It contained almost 800 point-contact transistors and 10,000
> germanium crystal rectifiers. It could perform a million logical
> operations every second, still not quite as fast as the vacuum tube
> computers of the day, but pretty close. And best of all, it operated on
> less than 100 watts of power. ¨

The first computer anything I remember seeing were the 7 transistor radios
owned by the (relatively) rich kids in 1956/7 and the single transistor-
boosted crystal sets that the rest of us built around then.

I never saw the inside of the Eliott 503's cabinets, so have no idea of
hoew its transistors were packaged, only that it was described as not
using ICs. The first machines I saw th interior of were the ICL 1902 and
1903 mainframes, and those big cabinets seemed to have more wire than
anything else in them and certainly guped power: IIRC a 1903 with two 60MB
disks, 10 tape decks, two card readers, a paper tape reader and an Optical
Mark Reader chewed through 20Kw when up and running.

Side comment: I thought the Optical Mark Reader was a great idea: it read
A4 paper sheets which were marked up with a pencil. I was involved in a
project in Wellington where the hospital's Heart Unit used them to record
patient notes: the page were designed by hospital staff, who apparently
preferred then to hand-written notes. We just wrote a fairly simple system
that red the OMR forms and stored the data on tape as well as translating
the marks into printed pages.

--

Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org

On 09/12/2023 13:15, Martin Gregorie wrote:
> On Fri, 08 Dec 2023 19:16:38 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>
>>
>> I've always said that this will be the epitaph of our society (spoken in
>> a nasal whine, of course).
>>
>
>>> The prime example of how not to do all of the above correctly is the UK
>>> Post Office Horizon screw-up.
>>
>> Is that anything like the Canadian Phoenix federal payroll screw-up?
>>
> I don't know about that one, but for sheer venality, bad management,
> incompetence, (seeming lack of) and purely incompetent system design and
> development and swindling the users this easily takes the biscuit.
>
> Private Eye published a good description of the scandal:
>
> https://www.private-eye.co.uk/special-reports/justice-lost-in-the-post
>
> and BBC's Radio 4 also has an excellent series on it, but the scandal
> (which would seem to involve management and staff at all levels in the UK
> Post Offoce and Fujitsu isn't done and dusted yet.
>
>> Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but
>> when there is nothing left to take away.
>> -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
>>
> Indeed: another interesting example of cockup by carelessness turns out to
> be the recent delivery of samples from the Bennu:
>
> https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/12/nasas-asteroid-mission-struck-its-
> target-but-then-dodged-a-bullet/2/
>
>
>
>
There's supposed to be a TV special (docudrama?) about it on soon.
Buggered if I can find it though.
OK! "Mr Bates vs. The Post Office" to be aired on ITV, starting 9pm New
Year's Day
https://www.itv.com/presscentre/media-packs/mr-bates-vs-post-office
https://virginradio.co.uk/entertainment/128839/mr-bates-vs-the-post-office-release-date-cast-plot-details

--
Chris Elvidge, England
CURSIVE WRITING DOES NOT MEAN WHAT I THINK IT DOES

On 09 Dec 2023 at 12:39:16 GMT, "Martin Gregorie" <martin@mydomain.invalid>
wrote:

> On 9 Dec 2023 08:53:19 GMT, TimS wrote:
>
>> Luxury. We had perhaps 8k of store and the only I/O device was a paper
>> tape read/punch. The machine was in fact an 803 (I misread your OP) and
>> so slow that it couldn't drive the reader at full speed. And it only had
>> autocode - no Algol.
>>
> The Elliott 503 preceeded the 803: I've seen 803s in NMOC but never seen
> one running.
>
Back to front; the 803 came first (1960 or so), then the 503 in 1963. The 803
was bit-serial, so the cycle time was around 2msec [1]. The 503 was much
faster.

[1] That's 500Hz.

--
Tim

On Sat, 9 Dec 2023 13:46:04 -0000 (UTC)
Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:

> project in Wellington where the hospital's Heart Unit used them to record
> patient notes: the page were designed by hospital staff, who apparently
> preferred then to hand-written notes.

Have you ever tried to read a doctor's handwriting ?

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency

On 2023-12-09, Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:

> On Sat, 9 Dec 2023 13:46:04 -0000 (UTC)
> Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:
>
>> project in Wellington where the hospital's Heart Unit used them to record
>> patient notes: the page were designed by hospital staff, who apparently
>> preferred then to hand-written notes.

It's amazing how much better systems work when the designers
allow the users to comment on what they'll be using.

> Have you ever tried to read a doctor's handwriting ?

https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/256071928782484982/

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | The Internet is like a big city:
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | it has plenty of bright lights and
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | excitement, but also dark alleys
/ \ if you read it the right way. | down which the unwary get mugged.

On 12/8/23 8:19 AM, Martin Gregorie wrote:
> On Fri, 8 Dec 2023 00:49:15 -0500, 56g.1173 wrote:
>
>> But not the whole thing.
>>
>> I'm more worried about the private/corp/govt shops where nobody seems
>> to KNOW anything about computers or programming or much of ANYTHING
>> anymore beyond how to spend big $$$ with M$
>> or Goog or Apple for some neo metered client/server model from the
>> 60s/70s.
>>
>> ENEMIES, real enemies, are keen to - and likely now CAN - take that
>> shit DOWN in an instant if the poop ever hits the proverbial
>> propeller. Too many of the New Guys have NO contingency plans other
>> than to blame M$ and friends.
>>
>> "Not MY fault !"
>>
>> Yes, it IS your fault ... and that of the pointy- haired bosses who
>> hired you ...........
>
> Agreed. If you fail to adequately deal with any aspect of application
> design and documentation, system architecture, performance, error
> detection and recovery, software design, including adequate error
> detection and recovery and, for non-trivial applications fail to have the
> client build and USE adequate acceptance tests, then you and your
> management have failed and deserve all the grief that comes your way.
>
> The prime example of how not to do all of the above correctly is the UK
> Post Office Horizon screw-up.

You NEED to have local backups - pref several layers - of
all your important stuff. You do NOT rely on 'cloud' storage.

You NEED to have at least locally-usable versions of your
day-2-day important software. Can users run Office apps
on their individual boxes if the net goes down ? Probably
not. Ergo something like LibreOffice should be installed
on every relevant box.

All e-mail thru M$ or Goog or its friends ? Nope - need to
have a local mail server that CAN be activated. May not work
if the Net is badly damaged, but at least you TRIED.

Accounting/payroll ? Can you do it THERE, at least half-ass ?
Spreadsheets usually work quite well - in a disaster you will
get a break on govt/tax nuances. Oh, can you pay people with
CASH MONEY in-hand ?

Users should be able to at least get snail-mail, type up
letters/responses and print them. Not as 'efficient' as
online stuff, but the world worked on that paradigm
thru the 70s and early 80s so it DOES work.

"Cloud" always SOUNDS so great - but the younger set do
NOT seem to realize how FRAGILE that model can be even
on a good day. Gotta put fair effort into being self-reliant,
self-sustaining. It's the 'professional' thing to do, rather
than "Blame M$" excuses. Assume everything can be screwed for
at least a month and some of your data will NEVER re-appear.

Hey, got any good old LAND-LINE phones ? :-)

Complex systems soon become so "normal" that people just
cannot imagine them NOT working. Then they start to make
bad mistakes. I was in a serious hurricane area some
years back. NO infrastructure remained - all the wires
were a tangled mess, water-lines were torn up, even the
roads were blocked for about a week. People had to WALK
places. No phones. No PCs. Nothing worked - even the
banks were down for awhile. The kiddies were in a daze
because they couldn't text anyone. Pay in CASH. That was
a NATURAL disaster, not 'cyber-war' or giant solar-flare.

On 12/9/23 5:14 AM, TimS wrote:
> On 09 Dec 2023 at 09:59:37 GMT, "The Natural Philosopher"
> <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>
>> On 09/12/2023 08:56, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
>>> The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> writes:
>>>> These were not despised as the product of 'white male science', nor
>>>> yet were they dismissed as irrelevant or socially dangerous. They were
>>>> seen as triumphs of traditional education and bloody hard work.
>>>
>>> You should spend less time paying attention to culture war nonsense.
>>>
>> It is very hard not to be overwhelmed by it Richard.
>>
>> When every single part of your life is affected by it.
>>
>> Frankly I feel your comment feels like saying to a 1930s German Jew 'you
>> should pay less attention to that national socialist nonsense'.
>
> Or those Israeli women near the Gaza border on 7th Oct whom Hamas "fighters"
> raped, murdered and mutilated (not necessarily in that order). Perhaps they
> should have paid less attention to culture war nonsense.

> See, it's like the naive ones of the 60s. Remember them? And how they said
> that peace would prevail and there wouldn't be another war "because we won't
> turn up". The jews of the 1930s didn't "turn up", nor did those women.

"This is the dawning of the Age Of Aquarius" :-)

Anyway, 'normal' soon comes to DELUDE. As the old Zappa
song went, 'It can't happen here ...". This is when both
individuals and institutions get CARELESS - think "normal"
is some kind of natural law.

And then .....

> You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.

It can reach anybody anywhere. Big wars, small wars, insurrections
and revolutions and even local disorder/riots. This is the history.
You are NOT 100% safe, not even in Kansas.

You don't have to go overboard and live in an old missile silo
with a ton of salted beef, but you DO need some contingency
plans - means and methods. Even a 48-hour plan vastly increases
your chances of a fair outcome. Do you have enough to eat/drink
for a few days ? Can you deter physical attacks ? Got some basic
med supplies ? Got enough cash to cope until banks start working ?
"Civilization" and its fruits are far more fragile than people
want to believe. The more complex a 'system' the more rapid and
severe its fall. 1st-world is 1st-world because everything is so
interconnected and smooth ... but that can CHANGE.

56g.1173 wrote:

> Until it penetrates my pension/SS stuff. THEN it's
> gonna be bad. Oh well, that's what LAWYERS are
> for ... sue the fuckers for ten times the damages ....

We all live in the movie IDIOCRACY - It is not the future, it is the now.

On Sun, 10 Dec 2023 09:29:30 +0100
Deloptes <deloptes@gmail.com> wrote:

> 56g.1173 wrote:
>
> > Until it penetrates my pension/SS stuff. THEN it's
> > gonna be bad. Oh well, that's what LAWYERS are
> > for ... sue the fuckers for ten times the damages ....
>
> We all live in the movie IDIOCRACY - It is not the future, it is the now.

My two favourite thoughts about the future:

"The future is here, just unevenly distributed"

"The future was never like this"

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency

On 9 Dec 2023 14:20:14 GMT, TimS wrote:

> On 09 Dec 2023 at 12:39:16 GMT, "Martin Gregorie"
> <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:
>
>> On 9 Dec 2023 08:53:19 GMT, TimS wrote:
>>
>>> Luxury. We had perhaps 8k of store and the only I/O device was a paper
>>> tape read/punch. The machine was in fact an 803 (I misread your OP)
>>> and so slow that it couldn't drive the reader at full speed. And it
>>> only had autocode - no Algol.
>>>
>> The Elliott 503 preceeded the 803: I've seen 803s in NMOC but never
>> seen one running.
>>
> Back to front; the 803 came first (1960 or so), then the 503 in 1963.
> The 803 was bit-serial, so the cycle time was around 2msec [1]. The 503
> was much faster.
>
> [1] That's 500Hz.

Fair enough: I hadn't seen an 803 until I first visited the NMOC , so
around 35 years after I last saw VUW's 503. The last time I was at the
NMOC there wasn't lot of technical info on the 803 or an Elliott timeline
and as I haven't seen one run.

I have heard that the 803 instruction set is identical to the 503: is this
true?

--

Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org

On 10 Dec 2023 at 16:04:59 GMT, "Martin Gregorie" <martin@mydomain.invalid>
wrote:

> On 9 Dec 2023 14:20:14 GMT, TimS wrote:
>
>> On 09 Dec 2023 at 12:39:16 GMT, "Martin Gregorie"
>> <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:
>>
>>> On 9 Dec 2023 08:53:19 GMT, TimS wrote:
>>>
>>>> Luxury. We had perhaps 8k of store and the only I/O device was a paper
>>>> tape read/punch. The machine was in fact an 803 (I misread your OP)
>>>> and so slow that it couldn't drive the reader at full speed. And it
>>>> only had autocode - no Algol.
>>>>
>>> The Elliott 503 preceeded the 803: I've seen 803s in NMOC but never
>>> seen one running.
>>>
>> Back to front; the 803 came first (1960 or so), then the 503 in 1963.
>> The 803 was bit-serial, so the cycle time was around 2msec [1]. The 503
>> was much faster.
>>
>> [1] That's 500Hz.
>
> Fair enough: I hadn't seen an 803 until I first visited the NMOC , so
> around 35 years after I last saw VUW's 503. The last time I was at the
> NMOC there wasn't lot of technical info on the 803 or an Elliott timeline
> and as I haven't seen one run.
>
> I have heard that the 803 instruction set is identical to the 503: is this
> true?

According to Wikipedia, that is the case.

--
Tim

On Sat, 9 Dec 2023 14:07:10 +0000, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:

> On Sat, 9 Dec 2023 13:46:04 -0000 (UTC)
> Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:
>
>> project in Wellington where the hospital's Heart Unit used them to
>> record patient notes: the page were designed by hospital staff, who
>> apparently preferred then to hand-written notes.
>
> Have you ever tried to read a doctor's handwriting ?

Fair comment, but maybe I wasn't clear enough in my description:

The Optical Mark Reader couldn't recognise script: input was on sheets of
A4, fed through the document path sort edge first. It could reading up to
24 marks equally spaced along in rows parallel to the leading short edge
and returned a list of words (the 1900 series used 24 bit words) with bits
set in then corresponding to marks on the input document. The printed
form, filled in by the user had a pair of short black lines on one of the
long edges of the path that enabled the 24 read heads when thet were
between the two markers and the users were expected to place marks within
preprinted boxes on the page. Any artwork on the page was in dull red ink
and was invisible to the reader, so was typically boxes round places where
a pencil or black pen mark would cause a corresponding bit to be set in
the word mapped corresponding to that row of marks.

As a result, the design of the input document could be fairly free-
form:I've seen them used:

- by delivery drivers where marks on the OMR document were printed using a
standard lineprinter to encode the delivery note with details in both
readable text and hyphens as OMR marks and with boxes for the van driver
to mark the number of items of each type delivered. The delivery note was
then brought back and scanned by the OMR to generate invoices.

- used by staff in the Wellington hospital heart unit to record case
notes. Staff in theatre found this easier to do with OMR forms than with
pen and paper when wearing their surgical kit in theatre. Their OMR
forms were then read and added to the hospital's surgical notes database

- I've also seen examples used for car repairs: the OMR document was a
copy of an exploded view of a carb, gearbox, etc with an OMR box
associated with every item in the exploded view: this was for
replacement parts control: the mechanic just added a mark into a box for
every item he'd replaced before the form when through the OMR to
update the spare parts database.

--

Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org

On Sat, 9 Dec 2023 14:19:55 +0000, Chris Elvidge wrote:

> There's supposed to be a TV special (docudrama?) about it on soon.
> Buggered if I can find it though.
>
See BBC Radio 'Sounds' for a pretty good audio version

> OK! "Mr Bates vs. The Post Office" to be aired on ITV, starting 9pm New
> Year's Day
> https://www.itv.com/presscentre/media-packs/mr-bates-vs-post-office
> https://virginradio.co.uk/entertainment/128839/mr-bates-vs-the-post-
office-release-date-cast-plot-details

--

Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org

On 10 Dec 2023 16:20:21 GMT, TimS wrote:

> On 10 Dec 2023 at 16:04:59 GMT, "Martin Gregorie"
> <martin@mydomain.invalid>
> wrote:
>
>> On 9 Dec 2023 14:20:14 GMT, TimS wrote:
>>
>>> On 09 Dec 2023 at 12:39:16 GMT, "Martin Gregorie"
>>> <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 9 Dec 2023 08:53:19 GMT, TimS wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Luxury. We had perhaps 8k of store and the only I/O device was a
>>>>> paper tape read/punch. The machine was in fact an 803 (I misread
>>>>> your OP) and so slow that it couldn't drive the reader at full
>>>>> speed. And it only had autocode - no Algol.
>>>>>
>>>> The Elliott 503 preceeded the 803: I've seen 803s in NMOC but never
>>>> seen one running.
>>>>
>>> Back to front; the 803 came first (1960 or so), then the 503 in 1963.
>>> The 803 was bit-serial, so the cycle time was around 2msec [1]. The
>>> 503 was much faster.
>>>
>>> [1] That's 500Hz.
>>
>> Fair enough: I hadn't seen an 803 until I first visited the NMOC , so
>> around 35 years after I last saw VUW's 503. The last time I was at the
>> NMOC there wasn't lot of technical info on the 803 or an Elliott
>> timeline and as I haven't seen one run.
>>
>> I have heard that the 803 instruction set is identical to the 503: is
>> this true?
>
> According to Wikipedia, that is the case.

Cool.

--

Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org