The GE-115 Project

After Eastview Seondary School in Barrie acquired its GE-115 computer in the summer of 1969, it also acquired an operational problem. Unlike today's computers, this computer did not run itself.  The computer processed individual submissions, one at a time. A student learning to program would prepare their card deck on one of the two IBM 026 manual card punch machines, wrap an elastic band around the deck and add it to the stack of jobs to be run in the metal rack just outside the computer room door. Then, the computer operator had to take that job, put it into the card reader, and process it through the GE-115. Then, the operator would take the resulting printouts and wrap it around the card deck, add an elastic band (we must have gone through a ton of elastic bands!) and return the completed job to the rack. Then, the learner would then have the opportunity to read through their printout, try to figure out what went wrong, fix the problem and re-submit. The turnaround time for thi...

After we had reviewed the artifacts, Cédric talked to me about the role of the museum in preserving and interpreting history. All of the many, many artifacts they have are historically significant. The question is, how do you show this to people who are new to the old technology? To put a computer on the floor in the museum is easy, but after people have exhausted their curiosity about the size of the old thing and the various different kinds of switches, knobs and wires on it, how can the museum help the patrons to understand what this computer was all about back in the day. I am going to call this the "museum problem". I'm sure that it has a better name amongst curators, but this label works for me. I now think of my work in creating an emulator and collating architecture information as part of solving the museum problem. Everything I have done so far, I did for fun and nostalgia. Now, I have a greater sense of purpose. Cédric told me that one way to enhance the patron...

Last week, I visited the National Museum of Science and Technology in Ottawa. I had not been there since I was in public school so many years ago. There is an exhibit called the crazy kitchen, which is a room built in strange angles vertically and horizontally and with interesting perspectives. It challenges your sense of perspective and balance. I remember that room from 50 years ago. Go see it if you never have! The Museum is the final resting place for the GE-115 computer from my high school. In 1980, the computer was donated. It was dismantled, crated and shipped and has been sitting in the warehouse ever since. I should mention that the warehouse is a massive storage facility which houses all kinds of technologies, including trains and automobiles! I met with Cédric, who is part of the team of curators in communication technology. He kindly arranged to show me some of the artifacts that were both meaningful and easily accessible. In our earlier discussions, we agreed that it did n...

 It has been a while since I posted. Such is life! This fall I have been poking around with the simulator, adding new features and testing old ones to make sure they still worked. In the meanwhile, some really interesting developments happened. The Computer History Museum digitized two new manuals for the GE-115: The GE-115 Users Guide Reference Manual and Programming the GE-115. I am immensely grateful to everyone at CHM for making this happen. These manuals had a tremendous amount of information in them. The Systems Manual (1965) had a more explicit definition of the APS assembly language, including assembler directives and storage declarations. This manual also clarified some information about binary and decimal arithmetic, particularly around how calculations proceeded when the operands are of different length. It took about a month to fix the simulator up to the point of accurately reflecting the new reality outlined in the Systems Manual. There were a number of interesting re...