[LONG, off-topic]] Interactive Programming

[Bill Frantz]

Peter - Thanks for a trip down nostalgia road.

At 2:55 AM -0700 10/7/97, Peter Trei wrote:
>     I first met Mel when I went to work for Royal McBee Computer
>     Corp., a now-defunct subsidiary of the typewriter company. The
>     firm manufactured the LGP-30, a small, cheap (by the standards of
>     the day) drum-memory computer, and had just started to
>     manufacture the RPC-4000, a much-improved, bigger, better, faster
>     -- drum-memory computer. Cores cost too much, and weren't here to
>     stay, anyway. (That's why you haven't heard of the company, or
>     the computer.)

Ah, the third machine I programmed in machine language was a LGP-30.  It
brings back fond memories of the not so good old days.


>     Mel's job was to re-write
>     the blackjack program for the RPC-4000.
>     (Port?  What does that mean?)
>     The new computer had a one-plus-one
>     addressing scheme,
>     in which each machine instruction,
>     in addition to the operation code
>     and the address of the needed operand,
>     had a second address that indicated where, on the revolving drum,
>     the next instruction was located.

My first machine, the IBM 650 had this feature.  The last one I saw was in
a technical museum in Vienna.


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