Ray, I've inserted my comments in your text, below.
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Hi Altair;
I have a few questions which are not exactly technical, but more like nostalgic.
When did you attend school on the machine? Did you work for Potter here in Indiana, or for someone who bought one of the systems to be used as a mesuring system?
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I worked for Sparton Southwest (now Sparton Industries) in Albuquerque for a couple of years around 1969/1970. At the time, Sparton was owned by Daystrom Industries, who I believe owned Heathkit at about the same time. Sparton's main products were mechanical pressure transducers and PC boards and assemblies for (mostly) Sandia Labs and the Air Force, for the Viet Nam war effort. I think they were one of the few companies who could successfully make 4-layer PC boards at the time. I was in the QC department, officially I was an inspector, but being one of their few employees who knew anything about digital electronics, I was also the designated repair guy for the Picomm. I attended the factory school in late 1969. Half for operation, and half for general troubleshooting and maintenance. Of course, any real problems would require a factory rep to fix.
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I enjoyed your discussion of the FerroxCube memory in the computer. Ah for the good old days of non-volatile main memory, and referring to the size in termsof"Words" not Bytes. Of course they were just a wee bit more expensive than semiconductor RAM. I can remember ordering an 8K stack for expansion of an SDS 920 computer. Word length was 24 bits and the 8192 word stack cost over $20,000. Now you buy a half a gigabyte for a few bucks.
It is hard for a lot of fellow collectors to imagine the computers of the years prior to the 8080 chip (et al) and the fact that we didn't have sexey operating systems, floppy disks, CD Roms, huge capacity hard disks and things like Windows XP that represent many millions of machine language instructions and many thousands of man hours from many thousands of programmers. I knew a guy who wrote a real-time data acqusition and control program consisting of 26,000 lines of debugged and annotated code in just over 6 months, by himself! I'm not a programmer and not learning to really program is the biggest regret of my almost 50 years of working with computers.
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I *almost* bought a Bendix G-15 computer (about the size of a refrigerator, tube-powered, drum memory, Flexowriter I/O) for $100 from an architectural firm in ~ 1978. That would have been a great conversation piece, and I wouldn't have had to run my furnace in the winter. At the last minute, they donated it to a local museum for the tax writeoff. The museum junked it a few years later, I heard. Too bad.
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Well I'll keep thinking about the PICOMM and Potter Instrument Company. I worked at Brookhaven National Labs about 30 miles further out that Plainview. But I visited them more than a few times over the years between 1956 and 1972, for one thing or another.
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Please keep me informed, Ray
alltare