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Understanding 9/11tv Early Business Computing CSPAN March 5, 2017 2:48pm-3:03pm EST
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for gold. the fact that this mine was discovered three years before gold was discovered in has huge implications on californian history. mercury to recover gold and silver. ofhout this local source havery california would relied on spain supplies of mercury. what is significant is without gold rush would not have been economically independent. it is interesting to think about the implications of the gold rush history turned out.
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>> all weekend long american history tv is joining with our cable partners to showcase the history of san jose california. to learn more, visit c-span.org r.ties to her -- tou we continue with a look at san jose. >> good morning, i am a volunteer here, i was a programmer in a laboratory we are in. at the time frame we are looking at, punch cards working. hole represents a piece of is zero, a one, that is information you see here.
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this uses a zone punch to make a whole. it is a means of storing information. emma 40's, ands 50's. i was working for a bank on the east coast, we needed a programmer. so it is an interesting environment. get someo go ahead and , we ready for demonstration will need a volunteer to come in. why don't you give me a hand?
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what she has done is type her holesnto the card to give for the card. putting thisg is card into the deck. program,ve here is a these are a deck of ibm cards. i would then put them into the reader. be read, im ready to will push the button on the program. you may want to come down here so you can see the printout.
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they are a bit noisy. the printer was a part of the design. pages ald print 10 , it is the same speed of a laser printer. but does not have the same formatting. ibm said they would be solid-state in 1958. they were trying to get away from electoral -- electrical and
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mechanical. there were a lot of burdens with data processing, partly that york, as well as outside of paris. there were two competing majority came with a new york design. a lot of the technology is , the 1401 came out at roughly the same time. it was a perfect storm. design.the far bigger the printer was four times faster than any other printer. unit went through
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transistors. what we have here are four , that was a breakthrough back in the 1958 time frame. came down innt 1958. we could put this into a business computer. it does accounts receivable, things that support the business side of the company. so we have that that came through. another piece of the equipment where the black dots you see here representing one bit. it is one of mistry -- memory.
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bytes inook at 140 this card, that is a tweet. hand.olding a tweet in my it is a breakthrough that we went through. the 1401 processing unit 3000 of the cards we just looked at. them in this0 of unit. the control information for attaching devices to it. the card reader is also to the processing unit. the minimum memory was 1000
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characters of memory. anything one windows with less than 1700 characters. there are 4000 characters in this unit. they had additional room to get up to 16 k. is 16,000 bytes of memory. the system that we are dealing with it great because i can look at what is happening, you read the next card.
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this is the next card that will be read by the program. is to am going to do reset the computer. another thing that was a drive tough was a tape store data. tapeld take one real of 72 thousand boxes of cards. this is roughly 2000 cards in a box. usually you would see it with new cards or if you are transporting a program around with you. i could store roughly 70,000
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boxes of cards on one tape. we can see the tape running now. reading data, we are so that ish a vacuum designed to minimize the weight of the tape. if i go all the way down here, the tape drive will not spin. things we see here with the system is that there is no display. there is no operating system. there is nothing to slow anything down.
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it was designed to contain everything. the next two cards are core the court will not reset. power the 1401 backup and the program will still be running. we are dealing with that. the question is how do i connect a usb together, i have cable in my hand, but that was not available at that time.
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each of these pins represent a path of data. the pins and wires are all a part of the system. to storeo find a way those cables. going to five cables the processing unit. is try togoing to do hide them, the black cable you ones are and the gray how you get information back and forth. it is much it's much different. today, we send everything in parallel. here, we do everything one bit at a time. so a different environment.
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from what we had. one of the things that was inque was, it was announced abu ghraib's desk at the number of machines being sold was probably 2000 to 3000 machine range. waiting forre just this machine to be announced. chomping at the bit, saying we need something better. month, abby and managed to sell 3000. there were roughly 15,000 of these machines sold. if i took a population study of all the computers in the world, from 1965, roughly one out of would be a 1400 class machine. a marvelous success as far as ibm was concerned.
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a lead-in systems 360, which was announced by ibm in 1964 and brought in a new architecture for ibm infrastructure. know, and may be running today with 1401 programs with ibm's mainframe and 360 architecture. her staffies to recently traveled to san jose, california, to learn about its rich history. learn more about san jose and other stops on our tour at www.c-span.org/citiestour. you are watching american history tv, all weekend come every weekend, on c-span 3. c-span, where history unfolds daily. in 1979, c-span was created as a public service a
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