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Very nicely done article.

However, I think the 029 keypunch didn't overlap the lifetime of the 1401, but I could be wrong.

The other marvel of the day was the 1403 printer, which had a lifetime that went long beyond the 1401. It was a bit noisy, and the cover you see in the photos there did serve as a pretty good damper.

However, when I did a co-op at IBM in Portland Oregon during my engineering studies, they had a 1403 printer hooked to a 360/30 printing library catalog cards. There was a roll of card stock feed by an automatic feeder that set perhaps 5 feet from the printer. It would feed more stock from the three-foot diameter roll when the printer pulled the paper out. The length of card stock between the printer and the feeder served as a very effective sound amplifying board causing quite a racket.



You are correct about the 029. However in the 1401 machine room at CHM there is an 026 which was the correct keypunch for the era. OP could have used that but would have had to punch it manually -- not fun! The 029 used is, as noted in the article, relay-driven from a USB port, so he could just dump the working executable from the simulator.

Of course for full authenticity he SHOULD have manually punched the source deck on the 026, fed it into the 1401 for assembly using the 1402 reader, and had Autocoder in the 1401 punch the executable deck on the 1402.


Obviously the 029 keypunch overlaps the lifetime of the 1401 since they are both still working :-)

But seriously, the 029 was introduced in 1964 along with the IBM 360 mainframe, while the 1401 wasn't withdrawn until 1971, and some were used long after that, so they had plenty of overlap.

You're right that the 1403 printer is pretty cool. One interesting thing is it has a hydraulic pump running the paper feed, so it can skip lines very rapidly.


And the disk drives on that 360 had hydraulic actuators to move the heads. Was that the 2301 or 2311 disk, or something else? Where I was in IBM Poughkeepsie we kept our programs on removable disks of somewhere around 16 in. in diameter. I don't remember the capacity but it was in MB. At the end of the line of disk drives sat our 029 card punch. I spent way too many hours at that punch because my fingers were so inept. There was no backspace 'cause you can't unpunch holes.

We used a card based program to modify the code that accumulated on our personal disk as ISAM data sets. I set that up for my department after dropping and bursting open a very long portable card carrier (of mostly unsequenced cards) that was used before my 1967 "innovation." :-)

What shocks me at the moment is the incredibly clear 50 year old mental map and images I have of that machine room and the computers in it. A 360 model 50 that I primarily used. Beside that a model 40, down the isle a model 67, behind that a 7094 and further on a big ol' model 85. Across the hall a honking model 91. No 1401's in that room, however, but lots of 1403 printers.


Thanks for the clarification.

The 1403 was quite an engineering marvel. Lower case, Upper case, many odd characters.

There is in fact a book published that was masterd by 1403 by David Grau, I believe.


I entered the Navy in 1967 and went to IBM 029 school in San Jose sometime in 1968. And I also took a 1401 SPS/Autocoder course at UC Davis that year. A few years later I learned BAL on a 360 and they still had 026 keypunch machines. I assume they were leased machines, so the lease price came down fast towards EOL. Then they got spray painted and leased in Africa and So. America.




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