From: Rick DeNatale <rick.denatale@...>
Date: 2007-07-22T09:33:46+09:00
Subject: Re: Taking the bull by its horns [was background]

On 7/21/07, John W. Kennedy <jwkenne@attglobal.net> wrote:
> Morton Goldberg wrote:
> > Oh, yes, I just remembered. The 1620 brought two firsts to my
> > programming experience: a drum plotter and a disk storage unit. I really
> > enjoyed writing programs that did output to the plotter.
>
> The only plotter IBM ever offered commercially, if I recall aright,
> staying in the product line years after the rest of the system had
> dropped out.

As I recall, the plotter was a bit of badge-engineering, it was really
from calcomp with an IBM badge.  It hooked up to the paper tape punch
interface.  You drove it from Fortran-II programs with the "punch
paper tape" command.

At UConn when they installed the plotter on the 1620, the old
paper-tape reader/punch was unused.  While I was there some grad
students in the EE/CS department commandeered it and hooked it up to
the department's  PDP-8 with the intent of writing a paper-tape
operating system.  I don't know that they ever got it fully working
though, IIRC the hitch was trying to come up with some handshaking
mechanism to slow the drive down.

-- 
Rick DeNatale

My blog on Ruby
http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/