The next challenges in 2026

It is time to think about the next steps in this project. There are several elements, and I don't have a good sense today of what things are most important. So the topics below are in no particular order.

It would wonderful to digitize the thousands of punched cards that are in the library at Ingenium (The Museum of Science and Technology). This would require taking some kind of machine (a card reader or a scanner or something else) to the museum, and then sitting with the many decks of cards, digitizing and cataloguing them. Given the number of cards, this would be a long process, at least a few days, and with the current state of my digitizer software, probably much longer. However, this would unleash a great deal of data, including load files (which would then have to be reverse engineered), program files that could be run through the simulator, and operating system command examples. If anybody has a functioning card reader out there, please let me know!!

It would also be very valuable to catalogue and review the manuals in the library to see what is there and perhaps, which might be digitized to make available to a global audience. This data would include engineering information about the computer, possibly language manuals and applications manuals, such as SPG and RPG (Sort Program Generator and Report Program Generator).

I was intrigued by the idea of perhaps bringing the card reader back to life. The device appears to be in good shape (see image below)

What I am thinking is an arduino interface so that you could plug a USB into a laptop and have it drive the reader. In production, there was a peripheral interface, sometimes called a controller or channel, which took the internal command (PER) from the CPU and did whatever was need to the device, including sensing conditions, taking the device on and off line, causing the next card to be fed, etc. It is not clear at this time how much of the control circuitry is in the reader itself (as above) or in the peripheral controller. If there was an access to the "read next card" circuit and then an ability to ready the sense lines for the timing chain and the 12 rows of the card, then it might work. I can't remember if the sensors are optical or electrical. There would be less wear and tear on optical.

The intersection here is two fold. If we could get the reader working, then it would be simple to digitize the thousands of cards. Also, it would make a wonderful demonstration piece, as there is something satisfying about seeing the cards move through the reader and knowing that the information is being transferred.

Another project is the attempt to re-engineer the operating system. There are some load decks in the collection of cards which might shed some light on how a system disk, which contained the operating system, was built. There is still a possibility that there is an actual system disk somewhere in the crates, perhaps one of the crates that contains the disk drives themselves (I am not sure if both disk drives were preserved, or only one). This would also require a method of reading the disk followed by reverse engineering of the code. While it is possible to fire up the disk drive, I think it would be a more complicated process to get it to work. There are a lot of physical analogue parameters which would need to be tuned (rotational speed, head flying distance, locating the concentric tracks).

We might have enough information in the card decks to do the re-engineering feat, but without digitizing the cards and analyzing them, we just don't know.

In a different direction, I need to finish the website ge-115.com so that we can reach out to a global community and get people to share their stories about the the machine.  

The final thought for today is the idea that the museum would like to do a demonstration of some kind in 2027 to show the simulator in action, perhaps utilizing some of the hardware artifacts as props to support the ambiance of the day. This project might help us define parameters and priorities for the rest of these activities. I would love to be able to connect the card reader to a laptop, read a program from cards and then print the simulator results on a printer. Or, we could set up a keypunch emulator on the laptop, and create virtual data cards and run it through the simulator. (For example, ask visitors for their birth date and creating a calendar of that month). There are lots of things we could do for an interactive exhibit.

Well, that's enough for one morning! So much to thing about. 

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