Nice. What would make this really amazing if was also fully emulated (using some basic robotic kit for the tape drives and, say, a Raspberry Pi). Myself, I was thinking about maybe making a paper miniature of IBM System/360 running on Hercules.
The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA does demos of the real 1401 (at least until the coronavirus hit), so once things open up again, anyone who is nearby should check it out.
Building miniature mainframe installations is very cool. Much better than a model railway set. I'd like one that works, of course, with blinky lights and tape drives spinning. The electronics can be modern and buried in a box under the table, but I'd like all the lights and switches to behave like the original.
I look at these pictures and can’t fathom how anyone could have the patience to place all those tiny “keys” when I can barely finish reading an article without getting bored and skipping to the next thing. How can I learn patience?
Daughter is an architect. She's been doing origami since early kidhood, and I marvel at the intricacy of the models she now handcrafts. Point being, like anything, the art of patience takes... practice. Tons of practice.
IBM put a lot of work into a detailed corporate design aesthetic. Itis described in detail in the book "The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design". The design principles were developed by Edgar Kaufmann, Jr (whose father owned Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater), and they were developed by Eliot Noyes, a notable industrial designer.
Some design concepts in the computers were recessed pedestals for a feeling of floating and lightness, the concealment of most of the circuitry, expressing the "inherent drama" of computers, the carefully controlled color scheme, and modern materials for the cabinets. The tape drives in particular were wildly successful at expressing the "inherent drama" of computing, to the point that spinning tape drives became a movie cliche .
It probably falls under the broad umbrella of Mid-Century Modern, but if you mean the machinery more specifically, i don't know. It's a little too grounded to be atompunk or streamline moderne, and a little too early to be cassette futurism.
What is that typewriter-like console thingy? I have seen
a lot of pictures and literature about IBM 1401 installations and have never seen anything like that. I thought the card reader and tape drive were the only input devices for the 1401. Can anyone point to a contemporary picture or description of it?
Because memory was so limited (8000 words), the Fortran compiler operates in 63 phases, where each phase consists of 150 to 300 instructions. In other words, the compiler's code was broken into chunks of 150-300 instructions, and that's all that could run in a phase.
I'll also mention that memory was 8000 words and not 8192 words, because the IBM 1401 used decimal arithmetic.
