Ken Ross and Paul Laughton demo the IBM 1401

Ken Ross and Paul Laughton demo the IBM 1401 at the Computer History Museum in Mt. View, California

[brianfleury]

The great thing about the IBM 1403 was you could tell which report was printing, or even a core dump, just from the sound. If you were running a job and the job cancelled, you could tell almost immediately because of the distinctive sound the dump makes. Plus, when the printer runs out of paper or forms, the hood would open. That way if you were working all night printing forms for like, a bank's end of year statements, you could load the forms, start the printer, lower the hood, and lean your office chair back and lay your head against the printer to get 10-15 minutes of shut-eye in between boxes of forms. When the box emptied, the hood would open and wake you up and you could load the next box of forms and continue the print.

The IBM 1403, the model 26 keypunch, and the 2501 card reader/punch were common when I was a computer operator between 1973 and 1977 when I became a computer programmer.

[garyprideaux]

I started working at IBM in 1964 and worked on dozens of 1401 systems. I never imagined seeing my old work place represented in a museum! I joined the Computer History Museum and attended numerous events, and halped with the Memorex at 50 celebration. A great place to visit if you ever worked around computers.

[phillip]

Such a blast from the past! My Navy outfit had 2 1401's in 1962. We used "Autocoder" programing language. My whole outfit were complete geeks. Thanks for the memories.

[videooblivion]

What a *gorgeous* machine. I’m grateful to have joined computing in the early 80s during the home computer boom, but how I wish I could have experienced the big iron era. If I lived in Mountain View, I’d buy the old timers dinner every week and just let them talk about these monsters. Thanks for sharing, Ken!

[ntyham]

I got my start in computers in 1968 when I was 12 years old. My dad was a Statistician for Southwestern Bell in St Louis. He let me program the 1401 computer in the Business Research Division on weekends. I learned Fortran II and Autocoder, which was a macro assembler. Later in 1975 I attended Control Data Institute, where we worked on an old CDC 3300 Supercomputer. Later I became a Field Engineer for Tandem Computers, and then a contract programmer for the next 20 years. Amazing to see where computers have come from then.

[jmcgsd]

In my early career the 1401 was our input/output device. We used it to load punched cards to tape and print output stored on tape. Main computer was an IBM 7080.

BTW, it was a Navy installation and we had a card deck for the 1401 that would drive the print head of the 1403 at various speeds so that we could get it to play “Anchors Away” when the Brass visited.

[euripidiesupman]

I learned computers in 1977, in the Navy. We had a class on the unit record equipment, and we actually did program those wire boards a few times. On the sorter, the instructor told a good story where he had a big deck of cards, all different colors, and that the sorter could sort by color. Of course, each colored card had 1 column punched with a different value for different colors, and BOOM - all the blue cards came out in the same slot, etc...Great times.

[Steven-dnx]

When the tape went into a rewind it was because it sensed the end of tape marker. I can tell you the the drive didn't always see the marker and it came off the spool. I just rewound the tape back onto the the spool and rewound the tape. Happened primarily during full system backup. Heck, I sure miss those days. I would love to go back just for a few hours to experience those days again. (MVS/OS and DOS VSE)

[bobwilliams]

First computer I worked on in 1965 at Ford Motor Company at Halewood plant in Liverpool England. I finished working in November 2019 still in IT at the NAB (bank) in Melbourne Australia.

[Larrypress]

What a cool demo!. I spent several years programming the 1401 and its big brother the 1410 (which had I/O channels that could generate interrupts). One footnote to the 1401 demo -- IBM had a program called the "1401 report program generator" that facilitated the conversion of the wired control panel "programs" for punch-card accounting machines shown in the demo to 1401 programs. You described the inputs, outputs, totals, subtotals, etc. and it generated the 1401 program automatically.

Another footnote -- there was a machine that looked like a keypunch called a "verifier." After a program or some data was keypunched, the deck was was fed into a verifier, and the operator rekeyed it. The verifier caught discrepancies between the punched cards and the rekeying. Verifying doubled data entry time, but saved computer time which was valuable in those days. It was also kind of a status symbol if you were important enough to have your programs verified :-).

[johnpsiurski]

Great Demo.  Brought back memories of when I used to operate a 1401 back in 1969 - 1970 when I was working for IBM.  The one item that the commentators failed to mention was how long it took to run an application.  For example, to process an AIC (Automatic Inventory Control) report for an automotive dealership it would take 6 to 10 hours, depending on the size of the dealership.  Furthermore, if there was a tape drive read error at a critical point in the run, you had to go back to the previous month's input tape, re-run that entire job to create a new tape, and start the current month all over again.

[MasterMindmars]

Very very interesting.
A good touristic visit at the museum of computer. I would like to visit it in person.

[williamcorcoran]

Great presentation! Awesome to see the real thing! This show had everything i tells ya! A little tech, a little mechanic, a little electronics, and a little sexism! Boy, the 1960’s had it all.

[curtisrawson]

Wonderful walk down memory lane. First class I had on computer programming was on a 1401. Worked with all this equipment in my career.

[mrbrent]

All these old machines bring back memories. I worked on an IBM 370 and 4341 with punch cards and printers like that. The 4341 I used 3270 terminals with Cobol and CICS to send the info to the correct terminal.

[pops]

As someone who worked in an IBM 604/420/077/080/520?/026 setup, followed by 609/421 etc, then ICT 1900 series I was in awe of the 1400 and 360 series. From a plugboard grafter!

[HarmonieHz]

One day i will go to US. During this travel, I will visit this amazing museum. So great stuff ! thks. I love your video.

[bertcampbell]

When I started out in data processing in 1968 we had the 1403 printer and yes it was loud. When you got used to how the printer sounded when printing you could sometimes detect when there was a problem with the printout just by the change in sound quality. This ability was especially important when printing payroll or in my case city tax bills. The tax bill was a large document approximately 14x22 inches in size. At that size you didn't want to ruin many since the computer room manager would only order a couple of cases more then you really needed. Those were the days!

[davedaley]

"In the sixties women did all the keypunching." Except in the military. I had the misfortune of being a customer engineer on an army base and the soldiers (male) beat the hell out of the mechanical keyboards. In accounts where the keypunch operators were exclusively women the keyboards never gave any trouble.

[suntexi]

The 1401 was the first computer I learned to program. Watching this video takes me back to the '70s when they were being phased out by my company for system 360. The 1401 used decimal addresses for its storage; the 360 used binary, and addresses were expressed in hexadecimal. They still are and modern computers still use this mathematical base.