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Computing for Science

The Computing for Science (CS) group supports ILL scientists, students and visitors in a number of activities including data analysis, instrument simulation and sample simulation.

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Alain Filhol

Summary

IBM 1620

IBM Strech Console

DEC 10 (PDP 10)

T2000

PDP 11, VAX


Computing

 

IBM 1620

My first computer was an IBM 1620 (1968) at the Crystallography lab. of Prof. Robert Gay (U. Bordeaux I, Talence, France).
 


IBM 1620 (from wikipedia)


IBM 1620 (photo IBM)

Note the printer, a typebar mechanical typewriter, a noisy, very slow and unreliable output device.
Note the bulky punched card reader/writer (2 or 3 cards per second!)
These photos does not show the huge cabinets full of ferrite rings and wires: the 40 k decimal memory!

 

IBM Stretch Console

Then I used IBM 360 and CII Iris 80 mainframes. In 1970, I could even admire an IBM Stretch (IBM 7030) at the Limeil-Brévannes CEA centre.

 


IBM console (photo IBM)

The maintenance console had millions of small pulsating, flickering bubbles
with sudden overall busts like flash of lightning, sun dawn, etc.
As many other people I took advantage of the gorgeous spectacle.

 

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DEC 10 (PDP 10)

At the ILL, I discovered "modern" computing with the DEC 10 (PDP 10) : command line terminals (no more cryptic  JCL punched cards!), interactive programming, interactive graphics screens (Tektronix 4010, DEC GT40), removable hard drives, etc. I also had a lot of fun with the first interactive game, the fantastic "Lunar lander" or "Moon lander" (1973)!

 


DEC GT 40 running Moon Lander (from wikipedia)


Tektronix 4010 (from selectric.org)

Courtesy Jim Forbes and the Selectric Typewriter Museum

Note the ligth pen for interactivity.
Note the very compact PDP-11/05 driving the screen, smaller than most today's PCs.

A vectorial graphic terminal based on a storage type cathode ray tube.
Note the two wheels on the right of the keyboard controlling the crosshair cursor.

 

 

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T2000

I also spent many nights on a Télémécanique T2000, a 19 bits computer (slowly) driving my neutron diffractometer D8 plus several other neutron instruments. The programming was in realtime FORTRAN II (yes "real-time").

 


Courtesy 2007 Aconit and Michel Deguerry


Myself typing on a Teletype 32ASR terminal connected to a Télémécanique T2000 computer.

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PDP 11, VAX

Then I worked on PDP 11 and VAX computers. I was absolutely convinced of the total superiority of DEC VAX mainframes until late 1984 when a colleague, Georges Messoumian, showed me an Apple Macintosh 128. At that time I was preparing my PhD. I was very busy making many pen and ink drawings. I was also creating my own word processor written in Fortran IV and capable of bold, underline, subscript and superscript through escape sequence programming for a daisy wheel printer. While the print quality was average I was very proud of the result but I still had to manually write the mathematical characters and glue the drawings on the pages. Thus, just imagine my surprise when I discovered MacWrite, MacPaint, MacDraw and the ImageWriter! No expensive mainframe was capable of a tenth of what a Mac could do.


I am still a loyal supporter of Apple's computers. I am the current president of the "Macintosh Apple Club", a developers group which started with the birth of the Macintosh.

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