curiousmarc

Blackjack game recovered from Whirlwind tapes

What do you do with 1952 Whirlwind supercomputer? We recovered a Blackjack game from a Whirlwind tape. Al Kossow read the analog data on the tape, Len Shustek recovered the digital data, Guy Fedorkow ran it on a Whirlwind emulator, and Ken Shirriff made a Java app so you can play it yourself online. And I made a wooden hub for the Whirlwind tape reels. Hey it's the spirit that counts ;-). See t...

Whirwind reel loading mechanism

When I saw the reel weird hub, I really wondered what kind of holding mechanism worked with that on the original drive. We asked the CHM archives to let us inspect the Raytheon drive we have. Little did I expect this triangle hub and clever locking bar! Like many data recorders, the drive has the two reels mounted on top of each other. Here we have already removed the bottom reel, and I demonst...

Helping out with Whirwind tapes recovery

I quickly made a centering hub for old Whirwind tape reels today. There is an ongoing CHM - MIT collaboration to retrieve data from Whirlwind, the 1950's mother of all supercomputers for which core memory was invented. We have a tape drive unit and a large collection of tapes. The drive is actually a Raytheon instrumentation recorder. The reels have a really weird hub. With the hub I made, Al K...

HP Board Rescue Mini-Video

A short video of another vintage Hewlett-Packard rescue from last Friday. Thanks to the more than 100 Patrons that joined in the last two days! 

More HP boards saved

We got word of another semi-local stash of HP 1000 boards about to disappear for gold recovery. We (myself, Carl, Lyle and Bob) made an emergency trip to an unlikely place - a beautiful ranch in the Carmel area - and got some goodies back. Look at that memory board. A whole 16k words of it! To our surprise, the whole thing ended up being donated to us, despite the non-negligible gold value - th...

Friden W Manual Scanned

Friden calculator enthusiasts, I have scanned the previously unavailable Friden manuals and uploaded them on my website. Take a peak at the incredible drawings!

https://www.curiousmarc.com/mechanical/friden-stw-10-mechnical-calculator

(look for the "W" manual)

Ken Shirriff blog post on the Soyuz clock

Just in! Ken has released his first blog post on the Soyuz clock. He has pretty much figured out what each board does and why it has so many circuits:

http://www.righto.com/2020/01/inside-digital-clock-from-soyuz.html

Analog Computer Restoration

Work has started on our new analog computer acquisition. There is very little doc about it, so we turned our reverse engineering expert loose on it.

Marcel's JPL Module (Enthusiast Tier Uncut Footage)

Marcel has a JPL mystery module. Can you tell us what it is?

Big tubes!

Look what generous subscriber John Lawson gave me! Huge high power vacuum tubes! He actually tests these as a semi professional hobby. These are the "rejects", so they don't work. But boy do they look good. He also brought me many rare HP manuals that I had been looking for. Thanks John!

HP 2649 manual scanned

I have been putting my CZUR scanner to good use, and uploaded the previously unavailable HP 2649 Development Manual on my website https://www.curiousmarc.com/computing/hp-264x-terminals. It has the details on all the internals of the HP 264x terminals and how to program them. So we could now try to ...

Tape punch finally working

Fighting to get the ASR33 tape punch going. I finally got it. On to the tape reader now.