1401: The Dawn of a New Era
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- Опубликовано: 12 май 2014
- The IBM 1401, a medium-sized business computer introduced in 1959, became IBM's biggest selling computer of the early 1960s. By 1965, nearly half of all computers in the world were IBM 1401s. This success was fostered by IBM developing a system that preserved customers' existing investment in punched card business methods while allowing for a transition to newer methods of electronic, digital, stored program computing. The film unveils the history of this popular computer, based, in part, on interviews with its original designers.
In its second half, the film covers the IBM 1401 Restoration Project at the Computer History Museum, in which a team of former IBM computing specialists spent a decade restoring two vintage IBM 1401 systems. The systems are now publicly demonstrated on a regular basis at the Computer History Museum.
Lot Number: X7011.2014 
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After getting out of the Army in 1968 I took a job as a computer operator for the Kroger Company in Cincinnati. They had a pair of 80K 1410 systems and a pair of 360/50s. After a year there I was hired on at Shillito's Department Store (part of Federated Department Stores - now Macy's) as a programmer trainee on an IBM 360/30 running 360-DOS on a 32K system. The 360/30 had the CS30 feature installed which enabled it to emulate a 1401 allow the native execution of the 1401 Autocoder programs. Instead of a 1403 printer our system had a 1404 printer. The 1404 was capable of printing on either standard continuous paper or on punch cards. It was possible to 'read' the card and then print on the card.
This was back in the day when you could get a programmer trainee position without having a degree. I learned programming in Assembler via OJT with the caveat of being on probation for the first 90 days. Too bad more companies today do not use the OJT ab-initio method. Having been an electronics hobbyist since grade school, programming in Assembler and systems in general came easy to me. And I got paid to 'play' with the toys!
You're a fool for thinking programmers, especially assembly programmers, to be hired without a degree and put on a probation. Nowadays this approach would cost way too much money and manpower and would increase process risks by unacceptable amounts. We're too advanced to allow for risk factors like workers without degrees. If you want, I could elaborate more but I just wanted to drop my 2 cents.
Kero, your shortsightedness is typical of large corporations. Some of the BEST assembler programmers I had working for me were people promoted from a computer operator position. Not only were they better programmers but flexible, open to new ideas and more team orientated. The "I have a degree so therefore I'm more etc., etc., etc." were generally less team minded, less open to thoughts or suggestions from lower-ranking employees in my department. One especially important attribute of "promoted-from-the-ranks" employees was the motivation to learn more and do more. I prefer people who are "hungry and motivated".
Nate - I have to agree with you. As I advanced in my career and started hiring, one of my questions asked "do you think programming is fun?" Also as to why you got into programming... If the answer was that programming was not that much fun and/or getting into programming because the pay is good, I probably passed on them. Most of my good hires came from two year tech / community colleges.
You're very lucky! I LOVE computers, but never had the opportunity to pursue a career.
Funny... I've managed to make a few million dollars in my carrier as a programmer and never got a degree. LOL I work with guys/girls with the high end degrees, hell I've hired a few over the years. In the end, what really matters is can you do the work.
I used to fix System 360 in the late 60's and early 70's. But, there were still 1401 systems at my customer locations. so, I had to learn how to fix them also. They had 4K of core storage (RAM). In addition, they could have a 1406 attached which provided an additional 4K. The 1406 was about the size of a refrigerator but only about half the height. This video brings back some great memories of my youth, and the fun job I had.
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Yes i had to learn how to fix a 1410 in 2 hours!!! The problem was always
the card reader which i knew how to fix(i had a pair of 1440's in my service bureau). I got that customer when ibm discontinued maint on 1410's.
I was an IBM Customer Engineer working in central Scotland and installed my first 1401 in Caterpillar Tractors in Uddingston in 1962 or 63. Up to then I had been working on 604s and 644s installed at John Brown's shipyard at Clydebank for the work on the design and costings for the liner Queen Mary 2. I remember asking the chief designer how were they going to calculate how much they were going to charge Cunard Line for the ship. Easy he reckoned, they knew how much Queen Mary 1 had cost, they built her, so they just added on the inflation factor to that price to bring it up to date and doubled it!! I also looked after 1401 systems installed at Hewlett Packard's factory and tested new 1402 card reader/punches as they arrived at Honeywell's factory. They resprayed all the covers Honeywell gray, removed the IBM badges and attached them to their CPUs for testing. If the 1402 went down in a Honeywell installation an IBM engineer had to go in and fix it but they were not allowed to say they were from IBM !!!
That was awesome especially how the old engineers helped out, I bet they had a lot of fun memories.
When I joined BOAC (now BA) in 1971 (aged 19), we had FOUR IBM 360/65's (X3 512K and X1 1024K) and a IBM 360/40 (512K) (Running DOS in x3 partitions) that we also used to emulate/simulate the 1401 computers that BOAC had just sold off. I remember I had to IPL up the system from a 2401 tape drive ! And it was very basic software. They were the great days of computing and I enjoyed every minute of it !
Several of my customers were still running 1401 systems when I started working for IBM in the late 1970s. The 1403 printer that came with the system lasted for another 30 years. It was one of the workhorses of the 360/370 era.
I learned to be a computer operator on an IBM 1401 system in the mid 70's. I worked at a computer service bureau that handled data processing for varied clients. It used punch cards and 10" reels of magnetic tape. The main CPU had 8k of wire-core memory and an additional 8k of memory in an external box about the size of a built-in dishwasher. There was a line printer, sorter, and collator to finish out the system.
From 1974 to 1978, I worked on the 1401 and 1410 systems while in the Army in Germany. My initial training in the U.S. was on the IBM 360. Our 1401 had 16K. A bit of a pain to rewire the multi-colored wiring on the IBM 053 Collator, but even more of a pain when the 083 Card Sorter jammed. You had to take the damaged punch cards, lay them as flat as you could and repunch each card. Fun and exciting times being "high tech', haha. Bought a Tandy (Radio Shack) TRS-80 personal computer in 1978. It only had 4K and programmed in BASIC and the "tape drive" was a cassette recorder. Did program an alarm clock that would play rock songs on the cassette recorder. My best program was recreating the "Bridge Screen" from the original Star Trek series complete with audio from the TV show. Don't know what happened to the TRS-80. Would be worth some good money on Ebay!
In the 1980'S and1990's i was partner in a nyc computer leasing co we had 20 360's 370's,
rca's univac 301, 70/45, ibm 34's, system 3's, 2 ibm 1440's and one 1401, and hundreds of
keypunches and terminals. i had 2 maintenance customers with 1460's.
It usually took me 3 hrs to repair a mainfame computer, about the same time it takes
to repair a PC!!!!! to INSTALL A 1401, 1440 TOOK ONE DAY!!! NOT 3 YEARS!!!!!
SMALL 360'S 370'S TOOK ONE DAY TO INSTALL!!!!! LARGE INSTALLATIONS MIGHT
TAKE A WEEK!!!!!
IBM'S WIRING DIAGRAMS WERE EXCELLENT!!! THEY GOT YOU TO THE PROBLEM
VERY QUICKLY. UNIVAC RCA USED STANDARD WIRING DIAGRAMS THAT TOOK
10 TIME LONGER TO FIND AND FIX THE PROBLEM.
SO 3 HRS AVERAGE TO FIX AN IBM MAINFRAME, 1 TO 3 DAYS TO FIX A UNIVAC
OR RCA COMPUTER!!!
I dropped a tear. How cool is that? Kudos to all who helped to bring this machine back to life!
it must have been a joy for the developers to restore it and to see it again in action.
First time I heard about the IBM 1401 --- fascinating! I'm not that vintage, but I had to deal with the IBM 360/370 to retrieve particle physics data from a German accelerator laboratory for my PhD thesis.
That was a fantastic short video to watch. I remember being a kid looking up computer in an encyclopedia to learn what those machines were, the explanation did not help me but it's likely that the picture was of 1401 or 360. equipment. I did not know that IBM transitioned to transistors that quickly as we always hear of how slow they were to adapt to new technologies.
after watching a bunch of the videos from the computer museum, the original star trek makes a lot more sense when they make several references to "tapes of the computer" that could hold endless information, a bit of a joke now but for a tv show based in the mid 60s it seems to make more sense now
Tapes are still used now for archival storage. The newer LTO-8 tapes hold 12TB!
Brings back memories.
I started working as a trainee computer programmer using Autocoder on a 1401 in 2003.
Spent the rest of my working life in the computer department until I retired as a Senior Systems Programmer.
Gerry Harris: 2003? Do you mean 1963?
OOPS! Yes 1963.
This was really cool. I'd like to see more videos like this one from this channel. Maybe featuring pieces from the museum.
Great to see IBM-history in computer-engineering, all the best in the future for IBM. Thanks.
Strange to think of a time when the same computer was sold for 12 years.
I was thinking the same, but then I remembered, that a few weeks ago I have restored an old and broken Commodore 64. That bread-bin was sold from 1982 to 1994 and mine was built in 1983, being abt. 37 years old, too. So, in some respect the 64 is the 1401 of the 80s.
Nobody actually ordered a 1401 after 1967(ibm would announce a machine
get orders and cash upfront(from leasing co's) then build the machine.
announce in 1959, deliver 1960 to 1967 about 8 years of sales.
Wow! Excellent! Thanks for the video as this is history and it needs to be preserved just as you have done. Please carry on!
Cool! Where can I get one?
Being a 90's child this is so cool!!!
GREAT video, thanks
The 1401 had a wild architecture. No adder. No multiplier. At least not in hardware. Instead there were addition and multiplication tables that you had to toggle into low memory. Even address calculation and indexing was done with table lookups. All serially-- one digit at a time! The engineers called it "CADET"-- meaning Can't Add, Doesn't Even Try. Pretty dang slow! What is now done in under a nanosecond took tens of microseconds.
Some wise guy even wrote a FORTRAN compiler for the dang thing. The compiler was very unusual. It had like 69 passes. Each pass made some small transformation to the code. For example, there was one pass that deleted all the comment cards. Another pass that gathered up all the FORMAT statements. And so on. Not fast, but usually much faster than the punched-card equipment it replaced.
Fifty years from now they'll be making similar videos.
"Engineers are busily trying to get the old Raspberry Pi working. The first one doesn't work, so they throw it in the trash and get another one from the pile. Next step is cobbling together an old MicroSD card for storage. It's amazing that these things only needed a few gigabytes of storage back then."
😄😄😄
I bought A 1401 with a paper tape reader in 1982. I paid the guy a dollar and agreed to take it away. At the time I wrote COBOL code,
I remember getting a Sanyo transistor radio in like 1966 ?
wow ... salute ... the compusaur run again !
Thanks for showing again, you can only think forward, if you think backwards, so to say in STEVE JOBS words.
so good that someone actualy revived them before its too late. and it becomes forgotten thing of the past
Шедевр инженерии и дизайна.
Great story :)
On the 1440, 1460's I worked on the computers, worked well. The card readers would
jam about every 3 months and i would need to repair the readers, not the computers.
@6:53 "leaky transistors" ? I guess they probably meant leaky capacitors. Because in all my 40 years of dealing with electronics components, I've yet to see a transistor leak... ;-)
He doesn't mean leaking as in physically leaking out, he means current leakage in the transistor, which can cause them to act abnormally since these are all BJTs and operate based on current flow instead of voltage.
@@jrchurchman13
Silly me. 🤭 Thanks.
Where do they get ibm tab cards from?????
With due respect, going back 50 years would be infinitely easier than going forward 50 years.
How many machines required to do some modern tasks, such as Internet browsing?
oldtwins it might work on a very reduced base search for: I baught a mainframe, now what
In another video they say they created a custom controler for the tape drives, that is what took them 3 years!!! Otherwise IF YOU HAVE ALL THE IBM MANUALS(BLUE BOOKS)
WIRING DIAGRAMS. it should take no more than 1 to 3 days to install.
It sounds like this was a card system that they reverse engineered to turn into a tape system
Ha! The same thing happened to IBM in the '90s with PCs. Clones everywhere.
Charles Branscomb died last month, age 90.
Here is an excellent obituary: www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/cary-nc/charles-branscomb-7681882
What does the 1401 mean? How much rom did it have? Did it use mosfet or bipolar transistors?
Thanks.
There's a wealth of information about the 1401 and the two magnetic tape-based systems that we restored at: ibm-1401.info/index.html
No-one has confirmed the origins of 1401 name (perhaps named after the 1400 character/byte minimum capacity of magnetic core main memory?). It was one of the first 4-digit product codes used by IBM in the late 1950s (the other being the large 7000 family of transistorized computers.) There is no ROM in the 1401 (back then ROMs were discrete diode cross-bar arrays). It and 7000 family used alloy-junction germanium bipolar junction transistors, only the second type of transistor after the invention of the point-contact germanium transistor (a photo of one is shown in the movie). In the mid 1950s, in anticipation of transistorized computers, IBM designed and built an automated transistor manufacturing line but then sold it to a small oil exploration equipment maker, Texas Instruments, who became the largest source of germanium transistors (until silicon took center stage). If the element germanium had only had a natural surface oxide layer (to build circuits on top and control behavior, like silicon does), I might be living in an area (Silicon Valley) named after Germany instead of flint. ;-)
Robert Garner Thank you for that detailed reply. I don't think the natural oxide was the only reason Si took over :)
Leaking transistors? Leaking current I hope.
NO ONE BID ON IT!!!!@ WTH!!!
What did it do though?
+adventcontrols It's a computer like a desktop only massive. i would guess a Commodore 64 that was sold in it's millions to homes has more computing power.This machine only has 8k Internal memory and 8k of memory in an external box about the size of a built-in dishwasher (as stated below..) The C64 has 64k internal.. I suppose a machine to match a smartphone if built in 50s would be the size of a 5 story building !
Mostly business stuff like accounting and payroll..
In IBM systems the problem was always fixed by replugging cards!!!! IBM always
had connector problems(they put $10,000 to $20,000 worth of gold
into 360's to try to solve the problem(gold plated connrctors), it did not solve the problem.
In the PC they figured that screwing the cards down solved the connector problem!!!!
Francis Underwood.. sorry Kevin Spacey thoroughly destroyed your name.