The pictures I took at the MIT museum today are at
http://tinyurl.com/5eytyy

(* jcl *)

 

COOL STUFF!!

 

Those pictures are great. I love museums. Unfortunately, your football team probably gets more funding.

John

 

Along the same lines ---

Charles River Museum of Industry
http://tinyurl.com/6bwfyx

MIT Flea Market
http://tinyurl.com/44mpwq

(* jcl *)

 

Ah ha, so that good looking young man is related to you?

John

 

I used to use a punch card machine, back in college (around 1976). It was considered cheaper to use punch cards to write Fortran code, modem it to Kansis where it was compiled, then send back for a fancy teletype. Ah, those were the days. I had hair then too.

 

Great stuff!

I'm surprised someone had a PAIR of Enigma machines at the flea market!

I'd used an IBM card punch machine a number of times myself. We were still using them in the early 80s to manage the engineering configuration databases for airborne radar systems. It was simply too expensive to keep them on DASD (Direct Access Storage Device, aka a disk drive.) My boss managed to dump 14 boxes of punched cards off a hand cart in the parking lot (10,000 cards/box) and they went EVERYWHERE! Thank goodness they all had sequence numbers. Had to take the whole mess to where the company had a card sorter, another arcane device:

The IBM model 84 could sort around 2000 cards per minute. It took well over an hour to sort all of the mixed-up cards once they were loaded in.

 

Ah ha, so that good looking young man is related to you?

John

He is the fourth of four ;-)

(* jcl *)

 

Great stuff!
I'm surprised someone had a PAIR of Enigma machines at the flea market!

His display varies from year to year. This years display was the largest I have
seen.

The fellows name is Tom Ferera (http://W1TP.com). When I talked to him a couple
of years ago he mentioned that he takes a working vacation every year in
Europe and tries to track down pieces of the machines.

(* jcl *)

 

Image 1759 caught my attention.