I can't believe a year has gone by! So much to talk about

 I have been able to get a few things accomplished, as I am now retired! I was able to scan and digitize all of the cards that Chris Atkinson sent me. There was so much information in these cards. It had Fortran programs which showed me language features that I had forgotten to include in the simulator. It had COBOL programs, APS programs and even some Spectre Map (a local language to simulate assembly language on a virtual machine). It took a while to get the information digitized from the cards, so if anyone has any ideas about how to do that faster, please let me know. I thought these were the only vintage GE-115 cards left on the planet. Until today.

I was unable to locate the systems disk at Eastview. The staff were kind enough to look for me, but to no avail. I got another lead from Steve McNie, who had seen a display at the 50th anniversary reunion. There are as display on a wooden frame which had a large deck of cards which was the program used to create bingo cards for fundraising activities. as well as listings and a disk of some kind. I will reach out to Eastview again and see if they remember seeing such a thing.

I had run into a dead end trying to find more about the operating system and how it functioned. My website is still not working very well, so I am going to rebuild it and then start promoting it. I have been reluctance to promote it since the discussion forum was not working. Now, it is full speed ahead. Have a look at http://ge-115.com . Have a look! I will get the discussion forum working as soon as possible.

All of that changed today!

I have just come from the Museum of Science and Technology in Ottawa. I spent the morning with David Pantalony, who is the curator for Science and Medicine at Ingenium. He showed me more of the artifacts which they have from the original GE-115 donation, and I was blown away! I was unaware of all the materials they had. I knew they had a number of crates which contained the various pieces of physical components .. CPU, power supply, card reader, printer, disc drives, etc. There was one crate marked "Misc Parts" and I was curious to see if there was perhaps a system disc in there. I had asked David if we could have a look inside!

When they opened the crate last week, they first encountered a lot of off-gassing from the plastic and rubber insulation used to insulate wiring in the 1960's. They said it was like Raiders of the Lost Ark to see all the gas escaping from the newly opened crate. See photo below.


Today we examined the contents of the crate. There were several long cables with complex adaptors (as many as 60 connections in some!). The continued storage of these cables is hazardous, so the crew there are trying to devise a method to best preserve these artifacts. It is possible that the best solution may be to recycle them, as it is extremely unlikely that the computer will ever be put back together again. It would require a great deal of technical knowledge, expertise and experience which may no longer exist among the living. As discussed earlier, it also does not provide much a learning experience even if it was running.

However, we discovered some other gems.  We found some timing strips for the card reader, an assortment of transistors, resistors and other electronic components in their original packaging, some calibration tools, and a large box of maintenance documents outlining field changes which were implemented over the years. This material will take a while to sort out and process.

For me, the most amazing discovery was that there are additional GE-115 resources available in the library! We looked at two bankers boxes full of punched cards which contained machine language loader files, programs written in Fortran, COBOL and SPG, as well as decks of operating systems commands, including FLW (FLI, FLD, etc.) for creating and indexing files. There are at least 4 to 5 thousand cards to be digitized, so this is on the new to do list!

Finally, there are dozens of manuals which I did not know about before. There are field service manuals and others that we did not get a chance to examine, as we were running out of time. This gives me great hope for the future!!!

I wanted to extend my thanks to David Pantalony and the rest of the crew at the museum for all of their kind assistance in this research. This will be a year of interesting developments and breakthroughs. It will not be so long before I post again!

Comments

Post a Comment

Comments will be visible once moderated

Popular posts from this blog

How it got started

The GE-115 Project When I was in high school in Barrie Ontario Canada in 1968, they installed a new computer called a GE-115. It was a room-sized beast which required several tons of air conditioning. It had an internal cycle time of about 7.5 milliseconds, so it could execute about 100 instructions per second, compared to current standards of several billion instructions per second. It had 12K of internal core memory, compared to my phone which has 32 GB (2 thousand versus 32 billion). I came to love this computer. I learned everything I could about it, including how to program in machine code using a language they called Basic APS (Application Programming System). By the end of high school in 1973, I was a local expert. We met with another high school in Pembrooke Ontario, and I learned from them. Then I went to the University of Waterloo to take Mathematics, majoring in Computer Science. In my first co-op work term, I was hired by Honeywell (who had acquired the computer division of...
Read more

The Student Computer Operator

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...
Read more

Fortran compiler update and back to the hunt for information

Progress slowed a little bit in July, as my vacation is over and I am back to teaching. It did take another month for testing and finishing touches on the Fortran compiler. It now does everything that the GE-115 Fortran did and a few bonus things as well. It was tempting to add new features, but I have tried to remain true to recreating the past and not improving on my recollections too much! As an example, the GE-115 did not have logical variables, as I recall, so the compiler does not support this. However, all the infrastructure is there to turn that feature on. There is always something more to do. I have not implemented the entire library of run time routines that were part of the Fortran library. These are pretty easy to knock off and I will tackle them at leisure. For example, there is a SIN function to calculate the sin of an angle. To implement it, I don't need to write something in assembler to implement an algorithm to calculate the correct result. Instead, I just need...
Read more