Honeywell H316 FORTRAN IV impressions

[UnitSe7en]

Jealous. :)

[nym56789]

I bet your electric bill is crazy high. E-ON Bayern destroys me with my classic systems and transformers. Great video though!

[douro20]

What dot-matrix printer is that?

[iraeus]

@douro20 It is an old dot matrix printer. Must be from the eighties. It could be a Centronix printer, not sure. It's Honeywell labelled. I used it with the H316 because at the time the video was made I didn't have a more suitable printer. The H316 (and the pdp8 as well) does also perfectly work with modern laser printers - as long they have a parallel interface.

I upgraded my printer. I have a Data Products 2230 drum printer now. It's quite more impressive. And bigger.

[Gameboygenius]

Cool. But may I ask you which drink you have in the bottle there?

[douro20]

So what is coming out of the high-speed tape punch?

[iraeus]

@douro20 The compiled program in a proprietary (but open!) object "file" format which again is fed to the linking loader together with other objects and collections of objects (library tapes) to create the runnable program in core.

[jtel]

This video is so very nice. I worked for General Telephone here in the United States from 1999 to 2003 where Honeywell Bull systems were (I believe) still very much in use for very, very large-scale telephone system operations. I really had a very romantic feeling for that old system which was called MARK (Mechanized Accounting and Record Keeping) which I believe also ran on an operating system called MARK III. I remember there being Honeywell Bull system manuals laying around the office...

[ewthmatth]

nice :D

[kd1s]

Now that is too cool. The Retro Computing Society of RI has an H316 with the orange front panel.

[keijigo]

This is freakin awesome! It makes me appreciate our modern computers even more.

[gfr3j]

This is great! Please make more like this.

[Pad6]

That is so sweet! Keep it mint :)

[motard811]

Very very nice stuff!

Congratulations for saving this wonderful piece of computer history and many thanks for sharing.

[Overlapse1000]

why doesn't it have side by side tape

[iraeus]

@Overlapse1000 Because that's not standard. I actually have such a tape drive. But it's incomplete because some stupid i***t stole much of the electronics out ot it. Restoring that is a major project.

[vihannes3]

Is there a START BUTTON that you can PRESS TO RICH?

[ascheepe]

awesome, thanks for posting and doing a very nice demo of it. :)

[theodricaethelfrith]

That is an extremely impressive system. Where did it come from? (for the record I'm a gen-Y DEC enthusiast with a couple of PDP-8s - so I get it, bro :)

[gruni06]

bionade :)

oh ich würde so gerne in einer zeit leben in der solche maschinen noch zum high-end für normalsterbliche gehörten... muss bestimmt ein tolles gefühl gewesen sein sich mit solchen kisten an damals bestimmt ungeahnte informationsquellen ranzutasten (zuviel den film "23" gesehen...)? auf jeden fall kommen mir diese gedanken immer wenn ich mir solche videos als jemand der nicht mehr als die 90er miterlebt hat anseh...

[topmscldad]

i love how mechanical computers used to be. memories of rhythms of paper tape punchers, drum and chain printers. it was musical back then.

[Zaekk]

Ahh I wish I was born around that time so I could experience that first hand.

[iraeus]

Still possible....! There are machines in California and UK. Mine is in Germany. The video is quite current - I even upgraded the system a bit (cooler printer).

[kinglonewolf104]

Cool video. I haven't seen papertape readers or punchers before. Thanks for creating and uploading the video.

&eB

[nonny300]

Brings back lots of memories....

My favorite era!

PDP8, NOVA, 516, etc.

[iraeus]

I also output the "graphics" to a CalComp plotter. The result was a 100dpi image,computed in 14 hours.

[Quag7]

Fantastic! What a cool idea for a demo program too, as we don't think of computers from that period as "graphical." Thanks so much for making and posting this.

[billbradford]

Awesome - and I love the video quality on this.

[smjcrash]

Wonderful video overview for folks who never knew what using these systems was like.

[adamskiuk2002]

They were the days....

[shizzafobble]

Excellent!