RobS
Experienced Member
I know it's getting late in the day here when I get messages from people on the Pacific coast -- and I've only just had afternoon tea.
The last time that I saw anything about specifying masked ROM they were asking for paper tape. Punched cards seem risky. I remember someone accidentally emptying a boxful down the central spiral staircase of our office. That must have started an impromptu sorting job apart from the hunt on every landing. Cards could be pretty aerodynamic when you didn't want them to be.
I'm afraid my "old" reference is a 1950s book on English computing. Punched cards barely get a mention there although in the chapter on computers in America the IBM CPC is described, albeit as being slower than most of the other machines in the book. However, given the number produced they reckoned that the total processing done by CPCs probably equated to that done by the fewer number crunchers of the day. As many early computers were used for number crunching the amount of data involved was probably small in comparison to D.P. operations, so storage media wasn't a big issue.
I noticed the remark about the possibility that you were from another planet. I have never been able to trace the origin of my paternal grandfather, allegedly somewhere in South America, but my sister once told me that he had a very gruff accent, so I suspected that he was actually Klingon. Then I realised that my mother was seven of nine; it was a big family. That's not the right image to have of one's mother.
The last time that I saw anything about specifying masked ROM they were asking for paper tape. Punched cards seem risky. I remember someone accidentally emptying a boxful down the central spiral staircase of our office. That must have started an impromptu sorting job apart from the hunt on every landing. Cards could be pretty aerodynamic when you didn't want them to be.
I'm afraid my "old" reference is a 1950s book on English computing. Punched cards barely get a mention there although in the chapter on computers in America the IBM CPC is described, albeit as being slower than most of the other machines in the book. However, given the number produced they reckoned that the total processing done by CPCs probably equated to that done by the fewer number crunchers of the day. As many early computers were used for number crunching the amount of data involved was probably small in comparison to D.P. operations, so storage media wasn't a big issue.
I noticed the remark about the possibility that you were from another planet. I have never been able to trace the origin of my paternal grandfather, allegedly somewhere in South America, but my sister once told me that he had a very gruff accent, so I suspected that he was actually Klingon. Then I realised that my mother was seven of nine; it was a big family. That's not the right image to have of one's mother.