Hi All,
Here is a photo of of John
Godfrey clowning around in the CS computer room. You can see a
couple PDP-10 consoles as well as a lot of DECTAPE drives in this photo
as well :-)
I've seen John Godfrey twice
since, the first time some time in the early to mid 80's and the second
and last time in the late 90's. By then he had moved away from
that house he had just a couple blocks from the campus and had a nice
place in a nice looking older neighborhood up on a wooded hill in
Swissvale. As I was a road warrior and US Air had a hub in
Pittsburgh, sometimes when I was waiting for the outgoing plane I would
call him and occasionally got him but its been over 10 years now since
I did that. Although I've been in Pittsburgh several times since,
the limited time I had and other things on the agenda kept me from
trying to contact him.
73,
Chris Hausler
|
Hi All,
This photo, in addition to a
second view of Carol at the left of the photo shows Paul Newbury, a man
several of us know. I first met him as I believe all Athenians did at
WRCT. By the time I started working for the CS Engineering Lab in
summer 1970, he was the "lab manager" or some title like that. He
was still that in 1976. About 10 years or so ago at homecoming,
"Scotch & Soda" was having a big reunion. Paul had been quite
involved in Scotch & Soda and thanks to him I became briefly
involved as well as one of his helpers. Anyway I attended this
reunion and Paul was listed as planning to attend but I never did find
him. However, it was quite a zoo and even if he was there I might
have missed him.
73,
Chris Hausler
|
This photo is of the two RACE cards I have, one just recently found.
|
The
last time I saw Russ Moore was in the late 80's at his house. I
had visited with him a number of times from the early 70's to the late
80's when I was in the Boston area to see either DEC or DG about
something. I did trade emails with him half a dozen years ago but
have not heard from him since. I did send him that Christmas
photo along with an email a few weeks ago but have not heard
anything. He does have a modest web page, <http://www.moorelabs.com/index2.html> offering
his services as a consultant. I also had another photo of Russ
(and the back of Pat's head) on the balcony at the hotel during that
visit which I'm attaching as well to see if that jogs your memory.
After that visit in 1976 I
was never able to get either Pat or Russ to come to a homecoming even
though at least one of Russ' sons attended CMU. I tried to get an
ASDG reunion idea going sometime in the 80's but that never came off
either but I only contacted a few people. Oh well...
73,
Chris Hausler
I received this from the Moore family on 13 Feb 2013: "We
are saddened to report that Russ Moore passed away on February 12 after
a long illness."
|
This photo shows Russ and Pat (somewhat better lit) in the CS Engineering Lab
|
From: Mark DiVecchio <markd silogic.com>
To: rmooremoorelabs.com
Subject: Carnegie Tech Photos
Date: Sun, 05 Dec 2010 12:42:39 -0800
Russ,
You might be interested in some of the photo on our Carnegie Tech Computers web pages.
Mark |
From: "Russ Moore" <rmooremoorelabs.com>
To: "'Mark DiVecchio'" <markdsilogic.com>,
"J. Chris Hausler" <jchauslerearthlink.net>
Subject: RE: Carnegie Tech Photos
Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2010 03:09:19 -0500
Hello Mark and Chris!
Thanks for the pictures. I guess Chris made it back to Pittsburgh for spring carnival this year.
Yes Jayne and I had an
apartment in the building next where Chris and Pat had theirs on Rippy
Street. It was on the 2nd floor. Jayne used to park her car
in the driveway on the side of the building. One time the tenants
on the 3rd floor decided to drain their water bed and the hose the
stuck out the window wound up filling her car with water. Ahh the
memories.
My son Steve was over and I
showed him the pictures and he explained how the campus had changed
even since he was there. He also pointed out his apartment in the
building next to the football field where the band would practice all
too loudly.
Somewhere around here I also
have a couple of the RACE cards. One card looks pretty much like
the ones shown in your pictures. The other card is scrunched up
like and accordion -- this was the product of a miss-read and the
operator re-initiating the operation without actually looking at the
machine. Don't know if you saw these things in action but they
looked like a mechanical disaster about to happen. The magazines
that held the cards were at one end of a very large machine and the
drum that read them was at the other. I seem to remember them as
being quite large with long tracks for transport of the cards from the
end with the magazines down one side and a similar track for putting
back the cards one read. The cards would wear out and they would
get dropped in the channel. As I recall the operator couldn't see
the RACE units from his desk and on occasion (or may be this happened
when an new operator was being trained on the system) he would respond
to the error showing on his console with a command that resulted in
initiating a new read request. The machine was smart enough to
report that the read had not completed but not that the card had been
dropped in the channel. The new request would result in the next
card being fetched from the magazines at the rear of the unit, running
down the channel (at what seemed like a much too fast to fast for the
design to rationally handle) and smacking into the previously dropped
card. This would result in significant down time to tear down and
repair the unit. There were two RACE units and I kept my stuff
duplicated on both drives.
Chris, I'm glad you had your
camera and documented these things from 40 years ago to jog my
memory. Do you remember the time we went flying to photograph the
solar eclipse? John Godfrey was the pilot, Pat Stakem, you and I
went along to take pictures with the home made Waterhouse stops on our
lenses. I believe it was March and we hit a freak snow
storm. The wings were icing up. John had new glasses and
was fighting vertigo and had to call the tower and get the owner of the
airport to fly on our wing to get us back down (visibility zero).
To make matters worse, once we got back down we stopped at someone's
apartment for coffee (maybe John's) and while we were inside someone
broke into the car and stole all of camera gear. I don't think
any of us came away with any pictures that day. Do you remember
when that was? Could this have been the same March that you show
from 1967?
73, Russ |
Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2010 13:37:32 -0500 (GMT-05:00)
From: "J. Chris Hausler" <jchauslerearthlink.net>
Subject: RE: Carnegie Tech Photos
Hi Russ,
Good to hear from you
again! I hope you are doing well. I just heard from Pat and
he's going in for some surgery this coming Wednesday, some kind of skin
cancer around his ear. My prayers go out to him. I know the
"C word" can be scary (although as I told him it loses some of its bite
the second time around :-)
Yes Mark fixed the link for
that one picture sort of while I was watching. When I went to the
page it was broken but then I continued reading emails and came to the
one where he said he had fixed it and so I went back and it worked :-)
Yes, the RACE is an amusing
memory. I mostly dealt with it spring 68 when I first became an
operator. There's already a posting on the site about my
experiences cleaning it. I came across a reference somewhere
saying that the big disks (one of which is seen in the first photo on
the site in the section on Carl) were 48 MBytes and the RACE was 340
MBytes, but in either case I don't know if this refers to just one of
the drives or both of them together. The RACE drives of course
were a separate system with the RCA 301 acting as controller and so
might have been seen as one unit by the G-20's. It is my
understanding that both G-20's could access the RACE but I don't know
about the disk drives. Were each of those just on one machine or
were both of them accessible from both machines? I don't know if
there was any level of redundancy provided in either system. I
know that periodically they were backed up to tape. I have no
idea how much data a full length tape would have held and of course the
tapes were "blocked" just like a stringy disk (and like DECTAPE).
My G-20 tapes were only about half length as that was largest size of
raw one inch tape my father had been able to get me. All the tape
I got came on NAB hubs so it was easy to put the G-20 tapes in use as
all I had to do was to get an empty G-20 tape spool and unscrew the
sides from it and screw them back in the hub I got from my
father. For the 1/2 inch stuff I had to wind them off the bare
hubs (no sides) onto the "IBM" type spools and keep the tape on the
bare source hubs from telescoping while doing this. I recall
using a turntable to do this, but it was touch and go.
Speaking of "touch and go",
yes I very much recall that day we went up in the airplane to try and
photograph the eclipse. The date for this was spring but most
likely 1970, not 67 when that earlier storm had occurred. If it
wasn't 70 it was 71 but I think you were gone by then. The
airplane as I recall was a Cessna Cardinal, sometimes called the
"strutless wonder" because unlike other high wing small Cessnas, it did
not have wing struts. This, of course, was good for photography
but the joke was the "wonder" came from wondering why the wings didn't
fall off :-)
Anyway, yes you, Pat, John
as pilot and I were in the airplane. Because of the Pittsburgh
smog a lot of folks were planning on driving out from underneath it to
see the eclipse. We, being smart, were going to fly up above it
:-) Well, of course the weather was marginal but we were climbing
for a hole in the overcast when it closed in on us. Now of
course, John was nervous as he only had a VFR rating (and in my brief
"flying career" from the late 80's to the late 90's I got in a couple
such situations where all I could see was more or less straight down
and not all the time either and it is a time for "heightened senses".
Snow squalls can almost appear out of nowhere :-).
John was calling the
Pittsburgh International tower as the field we had flown out of in
Monroeville was just a unicom field but the airport owner ("Woody" as I
recall) who by this time was coming up in another airplane to guide us
in was keying his mic every time John called so that the Pittsburgh
tower would not understand him, likely because he didn't want an
investigation by the FAA. Woody got up and found us and first
tried to lead us in by getting off one wing. He'd come out right
but we didn't so he then got in front of us and flew the approach
straight and guided us in fine. (Yes you can do this if you can
only see down if you are very familiar with what is around the airport
and as it was his airport Woody likely was. In those couple of
situations above that I in that was what I was able to do. Since
in one case I had just taken off from a tower controlled airport,
Rochester, I just called Approach Control and told them that visibility
had become "marginal" and I wanted to return to the airport. I
didn't tell them I couldn't see where I was going. Approach
Control gave me vectors to the pattern and I just flew them as although
I too only had a VFR rating I could keep the airplane at least straight
and level by reference to instruments (as John could also) and by the
time I got to the pattern and they handed me off to the tower I could
tell where I was by looking down.) I don't recall any issue of
wing icing but I could be forgetting that what with all the rotting
brain cells.
So we landed successfully
and sat there on the ground at the airport as the sky darkened and then
lightened again, completely overcast. Oh well. Then as you
say we went to John's apartment and while we were there drinking a coke
as I recall someone broke into the car and stole a lot of the photo
equipment. Yes, a day that will go down in infamy ;-)
73, Chris Hausler |
From: "David Chou" <dchouu.washington.edu>
Subject: RE: Carnegie Tech Photos
Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2010 09:54:47 -0800
Russ,
Unfortunately, I was one of
the midnight student operators who was "privileged" (aka tenacious
enough) to do the monthly backups on the RACE units to tape.
Third shift was rather enjoyable in that it allowed me to catch naps at
the end of the evening when things slowed down. Unfortunately, I could
no longer nap when RACE backups were occurring. As you mentioned,
the distance between the console and the RACE units were some distance
apart. There were actually four physical units, but only two
logical ones. The other two were either down, used for testing,
or acted as backup units. Given the fact that (I think) there
were two copies of everything in a single unit, plus the duplication of
the units themselves, they were quite inefficient from a storage
perspective.
Accordioning of the cards
was rather common; my impression is that virtually any physical problem
in the cards themselves would result in jamming. For the most
part, I was able to pull the cards our of the unit and the system would
resume operations. I always wondered who would replace the cards
and what would happen to the data. Over the evening/morning, I
would inevitably toss at least a half dozen cards or so. If you
have a picture of this, I would like it to show students and employees
since noone believed that such a device existed.
Another problem was that the
RCA301 and G20 would deadlock whenever errors occurred (usually a 5ERR
on the G20 console) and this was frequent. I would have to travel
some 100 feet into the RACE room, rewind a 7-track boot tape, type in a
25-30 hex instruction sequence for the bootstrap, and execute. Upon
return, I would clear the G20 error to resume backup. It was not
particularly difficult and we all memorized the instruction sequence
rather rapidly. On a good night, the backups ended before 8AM; on
a bad night, it would extend into the next shift. The only good
thing about the RACE units were that they offered a lot of storage at a
time when other options were limited, but there are good reasons why it
did not make it into the marketplace.
Dave |
Date: Tue, 7 Dec 2010 12:44:12 -0500 (GMT-05:00)
From: "J. Chris Hausler" <jchauslerearthlink.net>
Subject: RE: Carnegie Tech Photos
Cc: dchou@u.washington.edu
Hi Russ (and Mark and Dave),
Dave, you might be able to clear up size and partitioning questions raised below on the RACE and G-20's disks.
After I wrote the below it
suddenly dawned on me that solar eclipses are rather rare events and it
should be easy to find the date we took that infamous airplane trip
with John and Pat. It was March 7, 1970.
Also if you look at two
specific photos on that page with all my photos, the one of Fred and
Mary on the 4th floor and the one of the fourth floor as it now is you
will note a fire alarm bell. It's just above and to the left of
Fred's head in that photo and as the current photo is from the other
end of the hall you can see it down the hall and on the right
side. From what I can tell it's in the same place in both photos,
about the only object which appears identical in both photos, and I
think a "fun fact" (although close examination shows the bump out for
the water fountain in both as well but I don't recall the fountain back
in the daze) :-)
OK Russ, lets see some
photos of that crumpled RACE card. There is a story about a
somewhat famous physicist who would show up at physics conferences back
"then" with a pristine magnetic strip out of an IBM Datacell.
When he had an "audience" he would pull it out and ask the crowd what
it was. Likely back then some other physicist would recognize it
and say what it was. This guy would then crumple it up in his
hands, hold it up and say something like, "No, this is a Datacell
strip". I guess he had lost some data due to this problem more than
once :-) (I should probably dig out that Datacell I have, which
is a "real CMU" Datacell which I took out of a dumpster back during
that homecoming visit in 1976 and photograph it. I think Pat
found some PC cards from that "Digisector" he had worked on in the same
dumpster.)
73, Chris Hausler |
From: "David Chou" <dchouu.washington.edu>
Subject: RE: Carnegie Tech Photos
Date: Tue, 7 Dec 2010 13:32:02 -0800
Russ, Chris,
I did some simple math based
on assumptions and information for the MT-10 tape controller from
the Bendix Peripherals Manual. If I remember correctly, the
G20 1-inch mag tape operated at 256 bpi, which works out to a whopping
7 MB/tape, assuming that there were 2400 feet on a tape. Given
blocking and directory overheads, this number is probably high. I
remember mounting 20-30 tapes for the monthly backups, which works to
140-210 MB total backed up. Given the redundancy requirements for
the RACE units and files which were not backed up, etc, the 340MB
number certainly sounds reasonable. Of course, this all fits only
a single tape today. You can imagine mounting/dismounting 30
tapes in a shift, compounded with the multiple error recoveries.
Those were the nights!
Dave |
Date: Tue, 07 Dec 2010 11:33:49 -0800
From: Roy <r.engehausengmail.com>
To: "J. Chris Hausler" <jchauslerearthlink.net>
Subject: Re: Carnegie Tech Photos
As I remember it, the IBM
2321 Datacell showed up at CMU in 1967 and didn't last very
long. I had a test job that I would run against it and I
don't think it ever finished the job without malfunctioning.
Years later (1979) I
transferred to the IBM facility in San Jose. IBM San Jose
was the home of storage device development. At the time, the
facility was adding a 3850 MSS. I asked about the Datacell and
found out that references to the 2321 were not appreciated and the
device was best forgotten :-)
Roy |
From: Clem Cole <clemc
