Forum Discussion
older_fossil wrote:A Bunch of youngsters on here. :)
I got involved in 1969...
I was hired by IBM in 1960, their IBM 704 "scientific" computer used vacuum tubes with no parity check on 32 bit "words". When something failed, the only symptom was wrong results. Computers for business use had parity checks as wrong results would not work for that market.
The only thing related to connecting computers was a Transceiver that was a glorified key punch (for punched cards) that could transmit a punched card from one Transceiver to another via a phone line connection.
In 1961 they started delivering their first transistorized computers with discreet transistors, 3 or 4 soldered to a 3x5" circuit card that plugged into "mainframes" that contained hundreds of said circuit cards. All of which took up a large room and had less computing power than any smart phone of today.
