31–35 of 35 posts
New Holland went through a few iterations until being purchased by the Fiat group. It is a part of CNH with its sister company of Case IH.
Please note that the "solid state computer" wasn't fully transistorized[1]. Much of the logic was magnetic logic[2]. (Which is solid state, but not semiconducting) This happened at the time when Germanium transistors were hand made, and quite unreliable, less reliable that even vacuum tubes. Magnetic core was much more reliable than either. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIVAC_Solid_State [2] https://en.wikipedia…
I worked for Sperry Univac 1974-79, in Halifax, Montreal and Calgary. I was an "SA", Systems Analyst at the service of the Sales team. It was a lot of fun. The Univac salesmen were the cowboys that didn't fit in at IBM. When preparing benchmarks, money was no object, we had lavish expense accounts. In the Oil Patch I saw $100K deals signed during coffee break. One of Univac's problems was the proliferation of operati…
I spent seven years doing maintenance programming for EXEC 8, the operating system kernel for the UNIVAC 1108. It was first demoed in 1967, and was way ahead of its time. By about 1972, it was running reasonably well. This OS had threads, symmetrical multiprocessing, and async I/O. Written entirely in assembler, it was not fun to work on. When it crashed, a dump was taken to drum, and the dump was then printed, produ…
It seemed even more user-hostile than MCP.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> modern society isn’t optimized for productivity It's optimized for profit. Ideally these would be one in the same. In any case our productivity is easily an order of magnitude greater today than it was 100 years ago. The lack of technical progress into our legislatures and courts even though we currently poses the ability to afford the same order of magnitude improvements is a curiosity and implies there's a form o…
> It's optimized for profit. It wasn’t optimized for profit 30 years ago..?
Some exaggeration above, but less than would be fair.