The School Years

[Agent Orange]

In the late 70's I was taking an electrical engineering course under the G.I. Bill. I had just bought a TI pocket calculator with built in functions. We were doing meshes and nodes and the instructor informed the class that those calculators were nice, and use them if you wish, but if we followed his procedure they wouldn't be needed at all. Same thing in the tech math class which opened with a review of quadratic equations. Pi r square no pi r round cornbread r square.

 

[Chuck(G)]

@Chuck(G) - I love that movie! And that's always what I think of when I think of old mainframe computers. Was that a real system?

I don't believe so. Note the blinken lights panel similarity to that of the computer on the Seaview and other TV series: See here

 

[Gary C]

I always loved those early movies with reel to reel tape drives, especially when the 'computer' crashed and the reels unspooled all their tape.

I was so thrilled one day when writing a program to a Honeywell reel to reel drive when it crashed and the tape left the machine in a stream !

 

[richarjo]

Very nice and welcome to the forum. I have said it before but I love the model 1 CRT monitor that you guys had down under better than the one here in north America.

Hi and Thanks. I agree about the CRT. The one that was at the school had a green screen but this one is B/W. They came in both versions I'm told. I quite like the white phosphor look of it.

 

[Mr.Amiga500]

Burroughs & Sperry = Unisys may be the reason.

I know Burroughs merged with Sperry to become Unisys. That's not the reason for the rarity. This was a custom computer for Ontario schools and the Ontario government trashed them as they became obsolete. A few of the later Unisys models apparently got missed as the "trashing program" ended.