[LittleRock]

I had stickers printed for the three blank buttons on my dash: Eject Button, Companion Cube, Turtle Shell

Roll'n Wrapz in Little Rock, AR, printed a whole roll of these stickers for me.

If anyone wants some of these, I will gladly mail a set to you for free.

First come, first serve.

 

[jonthewise]

Oh, that is awesome! I'll PM you my mailing address. Thanks in advance!

[edit] Once I've posted enough to send PMs

 

[TimBolt]

I had a ‘75 VW Rabbit with an Emergency Pull Switch from an IBM 360 mainframe mounted to an unused dummy switch cover on the dash.

By the way, that was the one button you NEVER EVER pulled on an IBM mainframe, as it would immediately power down every connected piece of equipment in the computer room.

Back then, that was lots and lots of equipment, but we had 64k to work with, so you needed all that hardware!

 

[Sean Nelson]

I had a ‘75 VW Rabbit with an Emergency Pull Switch from an IBM 360 mainframe mounted to an unused dummy switch cover on the dash.

By the way, that was the one button you NEVER EVER pulled on an IBM mainframe, as it would immediately power down every connected piece of equipment in the computer room.

...and you couldn't push it back in again, which made it pretty hard to feign innocence!

 

[surgeonFWW]

I, too, worked on/with the IBM 360 after cutting my programming/compiling teeth on an IBM 1620. {1964, FORTRAN, Hollerith punched card input, dot matrix printer output}

 

[Sean Nelson]

I, too, worked on/with the IBM 360 after cutting my programming/compiling teeth on an IBM 1620.

Hey, right on! I worked on a 1620 too - but it was at a post-secondary school in the early 1970's.

We used SPS, the 1620 Assembler language. The 1620 used a table look-up to perform arithmetic and it relied on six punched cards at the start of your program to load the tables. I remember one of my fellow students who couldn't figure out why his multi-level report totals wouldn't add up and it turned out that his arithmetic table cards hadn't been reproduced properly.

The 1620's project code-name at IBM had been the "CADET", and the lore was that it stood for "Can't Add, Doesn't Even Try".

Boy, those days sure seem primitive compared to now when I can plug a handheld phone into my Bolt that will navigate based on voice commands.

 

[Aaron Bayes]

Brilliant. I need them. I didn't know it till I saw them, but I desperately need them. Are there any left, or should I get to work sourcing my own?

 

[AG5BPilot]

Hey, right on! I worked on a 1620 too - but it was at a post-secondary school in the early 1970's.

We used SPS, the 1620 Assembler language. The 1620 used a table look-up to perform arithmetic and it relied on six punched cards at the start of your program to load the tables. I remember one of my fellow students who couldn't figure out why his multi-level report totals wouldn't add up and it turned out that his arithmetic table cards hadn't been reproduced properly.

The 1620's project code-name at IBM had been the "CADET", and the lore was that it stood for "Can't Add, Doesn't Even Try".

Boy, those days sure seem primitive compared to now when I can plug a handheld phone into my Bolt that will navigate based on voice commands.

Remember this?

4900796

My high school in the mid 70's had several computers including a 1620. We used it to learn Fortran.

 

[Fivedoor]

The oldest programing language I have used was "Dowtran" Dow Chemical's corruption of Fortran. This was on a coal gasification unit built in the 1990's but Dowtran was still used. We had 4 separate control cabinets controlling the plant, and each one was programmed by a different engineer with different quirks and foibles. I remember "C" system (#3 of the 4) was a nightmare to navigate with logic loops that went nowhere, and code that didn't work just blocked off from access by the rest of the program... so if you were trying to troubleshoot something there was a good chance you would spend hours puzzling out a section of code just to realize that it did absolutely nothing!

I was going to ask the OP about living in Arkansas, but he has only made 18 posts in 8 months I have a feeling he wont read this.

Later,

Keith

 

[Raymondjram]

I, too, worked on/with the IBM 360 after cutting my programming/compiling teeth on an IBM 1620. {1964, FORTRAN, Hollerith punched card input, dot matrix printer output}

My first computer was in 1972 as a college student learning FORTRAN on a desk sized IBM 1130 with 4 KB RAM, and a 5 MB "pizza size" removable cartridge disk in the desk drawer. Later my first computer I worked on (even doing repairs) during my 37 years in EDP (later IT) was an IBM System 360/30 (see picture) running DOS with 16 KB RAM, a "washing machine size" removable 10 MB Model 2311 disk drive, two Model 2415 800 BPI tape drices, a Selectric "golf ball" typewriter main console, a Model 28 ASR Teletype secondary console, and two Model 2702 communications control units (using 60 mA current loop mercury-wetted relays) which manged the entire Telegraph System of the Puerto Rico Communications Authority between 1974 and 1981. I do remember the red pull EPO switch, and it was resettable, but you needed the key to open the mainframe face panel and loosen a screw to reset it. The EPO (Emergency Power Off) can also power off the external I/O controllers if the EPO cables (in addition to the Bus and Tag cables) were attached. I still remember the huge "gates" (large internal frames) with gold-plated "point to point" wiring pins and yellow wires on small boards, and plug in modules using RTL (Resistor Transistor Logic) inside square metal cans.

In 1972The PRCA had an IBM System 370/148 running OS/VS with 1 MB of RAM and 300 MB 3350 hard drives, that used the first 8-inch diskettes for MIPL (Microcode Initial Program Load), other modern controllers, and the CRT (3270 class) green screen terminals. It was impressive, instructional, and lots of fun!! In those 37 years (later at PRTC and Claro) I worked with all the IBM mainframes (my last was a impressive seven-foot tall System z10 running MV in 2011 - see pictures), all the midrange (RS/6000 and Power Servers running AIX), all the xSeries servers (Windows and Linux), and all the PC models from the 5120 IBM Personal Computer (PC/DOS) to the last ThinkStations (OS/2) before Lenovo took the PC market from IBM. All of that is in my past but I really enjoyed working with all that IBM hardware and others brands that are too numerous to write here.

 

[AG5BPilot]

Anybody else have a "sound card" for the IBM 1620? No? That's probably because they didn't make one. You had to be creative.

If you ever see a movie showing an old computer with many banks of flashing lights, usually on alternating blue and grey panels, chances are you're looking at an IBM 1620 console, or a similar computer. Those bulbs are neon bulbs. They just happen to give off a lot of RFI.

You could program the computer such that those console lights flickered, and you could vary the frequency of the flickering by altering the timing loops. Then all you had to do was place an transistor radio on the console, and you could play music.

Try doing that on an iPad! Oh, wait....

 

[IAmABoltNut]

I had stickers printed for the three blank buttons on my dash: Eject Button, Companion Cube, Turtle Shell

Roll'n Wrapz in Little Rock, AR, printed a whole roll of these stickers for me.

If anyone wants some of these, I will gladly mail a set to you for free.

First come, first serve.

 

[p7wang]

This Tesla Model 3 Rolls Coal And Has A 'Working' Exhaust

This Tesla Model 3 now has its Halloween 'costume' ready. It's complete with a hood stack that rolls coal. Wait, what? You have to see it to believe it.

insideevs.com

Add tow hitch and wire this to one of the blank buttons. When you get coal rolled, you can reciprocate.

 

[Herbie Bolt]

Be careful with HappyTappyCo I ordered the blank button stickers and without any other credit card purchases my credit card information was stolen, MasterCard called asking if I just purchased an I-Pad, my next statement was for $5,000.00 of purchases I didn’t make.