I find weird stuff in the antique shops. Friday some copies of Hemmings Motor News from 1964-68 followed me home. In those days they printed it in 5-1/4" x 8-1/8" format and about 175 pages.
It is about half Ford Model T and A cars and parts, and the rest mostly US makes 1900-1950, like a barn find 1899 Winton. Gee it was only 65 years old at the time and I’m driving a 65 year old car. A few ads for early Rolls and Mercedes. Harrah’s ran some full page ads for Duesenberg parts wanted.
But there were two ads for Jaguars.
It would be fun if either of those cars could be traced to the present owners.
Its funny to think how times have changed and we are now in the computer age. Most ads in '64 did not have postal zip codes and most did not have phone numbers, it was all just snail mail.
But then there was this:
Around junior high for me, our family had some kind of teletype machine with punch tape at home for remote computer access in mid- to late- 1960s. The earliest mainframe computers I remember using were CDC 7600 (and maybe some 6600 time), and university there were two in the PDP series but I can’t recall which numbers and a Sigma 7. In early 1970s I had a summer job where we would write the programs and type them onto the punch cards and I would drive boxes of the cards over to CDC for putting the job in the queue and picking up the print output from the previous run, disappointingly often the output was a core dump due to my programming errors in Fortran.
Hahaha…brings back some memories. In grad school (Texas) I would program all day in Fortran, walk the cards over to the mainframe, then wait for my line printer output which was invariably a core dump.
I then moved to Washington Univ. (St. Louis, MO) for more schooling. We had a LINC computer in the lab–the first laboratory minicomputer, which later became the PDP 8. That’s probably what you had (there were several variants) as its successor, the PDP 11, didn’t come out until around 1970.
The co-inventor of the LINC/PDP 8, Charlie Molnar, was head of the computer department at our school and a close friend of my boss. I used to visit his lab, where he would show me new stuff still under development, like “floppy discs” (he found the name amusing). The early ones were about a food wide–which was a lot smaller than the hard drives at the time. He was developing new computer technology based on emitter-coupled logic, which had the potential to be very fast. Then came the microprocessor (which he had nothing to do with) and that was the end of ECL, as well as minicomputers generally.
Sorry to be so long winded but one other thing makes me chuckle as I’m recalling this. By the time microprocessors began to take over, all of the labs at our school (and elsewhere) had PDP 11’s or the next generation, called VAX-11s. They were expensive to buy and to operate (service contracts). As researchers discovered PCs, they would try to sell their refrigerator-sized minicomputers, but there was no market. So researchers who still thought that PCs were a fad couldn’t resist the free minis and started collecting them from nearby labs. Of course even these die hards eventually saw the light, but by then they had 3 or 4 giant machines to get rid of. I remember one morning when a colleague of mine had finally bitten the bullet–the hall in front of his lab was completely full of PDP and VAX machines waiting for disposal. Remind me of hoarding car parts.
