<font color='black' size='3' face='Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif'><font size="3">The first company I worked for where I did embedded programming had recently upgraded from such a system. I was told that an assembly took 18 hours. We had a deep culture of patching where you would put in a jump statement to an unused part of memory, put your new code there and jump back to the end of the skipped code.<br>
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We were programming the old RCA 1802. What a neat chip.<br>
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<div style="clear:both"><font size="4">Dave Massey</font><br>
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<div style="font-family:arial,helvetica;font-size:10pt;color:black">-----Original Message-----<br>
From: Randall <TR3driver@ca.rr.com><br>
To: triumphs <triumphs@autox.team.net><br>
Sent: Wed, Apr 19, 2017 1:17 pm<br>
Subject: Re: [TR] Cheers!<br>
<br>
> In the late 70's to 81 I was working with a mini computer that used core<br>
> memory. This was a 19 inch rack type device and the core planes filled<br>
> several levels. Then they came out with a really big computer that had a<br>
> hard drive. It was a good 14 inches in diameter and 5 or 6 inches tall<br>
> and the annual service was to refill it with nitrogen (or some other<br>
clean,<br>
> dry gas). It had a whopping 1 megabyte!<br>
<br>
Me too, except the hard drive was a whole 2Mb, with half of that in a<br>
removable cartridge. It took up two 12" high spaces in a 19" rack, one for<br>
the drive itself and another for the power supply. That was only on our<br>
development system though, the systems we sold had only 9 track mag tapes<br>
(and sometimes not even that).<br>
<br>
I tried once doing a build on an older machine that had only an ASR33<br>
teletype for mass storage. That was an interesting waste of time! The<br>
machine had only 8k of 16 bit words, so first you had to load the editor<br>
through the paper tape reader (using the front panel to control the loading<br>
process), then you could edit the program a few lines at a time, reading as<br>
much into memory as would fit, making changes, then punching new tape.<br>
Lather, rinse and repeat until it was right.<br>
<br>
When you were done with that, load the first pass of the assembler, and feed<br>
it your source. It would produce an intermediate paper tape (which included<br>
the source as well). Then load the 2nd pass of the assembler and feed it<br>
the intermediate tape. It would spit out a relocatable binary file (if<br>
nothing went wrong of course). Then if you wanted a listing, you had to<br>
load the 3rd pass, and feed it the output of the 1st pass again.<br>
<br>
All of this took place at the whopping speed of 10 bytes per second. Yes,<br>
bytes.<br>
<br>
Now load the 1st pass of the loader and feed it each binary file in the<br>
correct order. (I forget now why it made a difference, but the order was<br>
important.) It would spit out a symbol table. Then load the 2nd pass, feed<br>
it the symbol table tape and then all the binary tapes again, in the correct<br>
order. If you were lucky, it would spit out a paper tape with your<br>
executable program on it. (I wasn't so lucky and after having spent all day<br>
on it, gave up.) Oh yeah, again if you wanted a listing, that was another<br>
pass.<br>
<br>
Small wonder that our field service people would usually key in patches by<br>
hand through the front panel, and just dump memory to tape to create a new<br>
load tape. If you were lucky, they would correctly record the patch by hand<br>
on a paper listing (but of course finding the right listing could be<br>
interesting as well).<br>
<br>
Definitely the bad old days. But solid state memory was just coming out,<br>
along with more powerful machines and hard drives so things got better<br>
quickly.<br>
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-- Randall<br>
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