Amazing updates from a variety of sources

The winter has been very busy, unseasonably cold and lots of snow in Canada. The winter used to be like this all the time, but we have forgotten!

So much has happened in the first 8 weeks of the year. Tremendous news below!

First, the Museum of Science and Technology wants to include the simulator in their permanent collection of artifacts. This would include hosting the simulator in such a way that the public can download it and try it out. I am beyond ecstatic with this development. It will require some more work .. some usage manuals and training videos, but the results will be well worth the effort. The timing is flexible, but I am hoping that we can complete the work this calendar year.

In other news, I reached out on Facebook to a page dedicated to my old high school Eastview from the 70s. I posted some information about the project and mentioned that I was trying to reach Tim Crawford, if he was still alive. Tim organized the donation of the computer to the Museum, but was there from the beginning. Sure enough, within a couple of hours, I was on the phone with Tim!! 

We had a wonderful chat. He told me that about going shopping for the computer in 1968 with the principal, W. O. (Bill) Mitchell. They had looked at this computer and the IBM 1130. They settled on this machine because it was possible to purchase it rather than rent it. IBM preferred that customers rented computers in those days, as they would be able to keep them in the fold as technology advanced and the computers became obsolete.

Here's something I didn't know: this was the first computer installed in a high school in Canada. I did not realize, as a student, how the opportunity was so special and unique. Tim told me that they had difficulty developing curricula for computer programming, as it was such a new field for high school students. Eventually, he wrote several books for McGraw Hill, including teacher manuals, for various computer topics. He was very focused on the use of computers in business. The books are out of print now, but there are some copies around, including some at the Simcoe County Museum. Later in his life, he became a historian, including documenting the settlement of Africans who had escaped slavery before emancipation and settled in Oro township. I grew up near the African Episcopal Church on the the 3rd line of Oro Township (now Oro-Medonte). It was these settlers who gave Oro its name.

Tim is 90 years old now, and wants to contribute to the effort of documenting this important time in education. I hope to meet with him soon to show him the simulator and share some more stories. He warned me that his energy flags after half an hour, so I will treat my interactions as precious and will do my best to not tax him.

In the process, I also connected with several of my fellow students from back in the day. One of them (I won't post his name without permission, which I will ask for) has a collection of computer cards from those times. His father, who has since passed, kept them. He has kindly agreed to let me have a look at them. This would be fantastic for checking out the syntax. I still do not have anything definitive on Fortran or Cobol for this computer .. I used enough Fortran that I remember most of it, but my use of Cobol in high school was quite limited. I used a lot of Cobol later in my career, but I am foggy on the specific syntax of the GE Cobol. He also shared a number of great stories with me. I look forward to catching up with him when I am next in Barrie.

Another amazing thing Tim told me is that there was a removable disk that had been stored in the vault at Eastview. He saw it at the 50th anniversary of the school, which was 2017. I have since contacted the school to see if they still have it. This is exciting for a couple of reasons. First, it might make sense to donate this artifact to the Museum of Science and Technology. Second, this is likely to be a system disk, meaning that it contains a copy of the operating system, including the Fortran and Cobol compilers. It is not outside the realm of the possible to think that we might be able to extract the information from this disk (which holds only about 1 MB of data). Then, we could really make the simulator sing by running the original software. I am very excited about this possibility, as we could get a list of DOS commands, see how the program file and free space table are structured, and a number of other possible discoveries. Of course, first, we have to locate the disk!

For the last month, I have been pulled off to work on another project which will wrap at the end of February. Then I can better focus on what needs to be done next!

Jim

 

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