Heavy Duty Computing: Univac 1219 In Action

How many times do I say "Wow!" during this video? Yea... this machine from 1969 is that awesome. Enjoy!
#franlab #computer #history
- Music by Fran Blanche -

[michaelfrench]

Holy crap! Ever since I was a little kid I wanted to see one of these things actually work! I only saw them in a book. This! This is why I'm subscribed

[bernielarrivee]

I could almost smell the oil and feel the warm air coming off that last mechanical marvel.
I didn't start using computers until around '85, but we were still using the same mechanical printers and tape machines.
Ah, ancient memories...

[Torby]

In the days of 8080 microcomputer, we had an old dual cassette drive we sometimes played with, but was mostly obsolete. Hans always wanted me to make a CP/M bios that made it drives C and D. One day, it quit working. I was not going to worry about it since we did not actually use it for anything, but Hans wanted it fixed. Inside, I found bunches of wire wrap. On the connector to the computer, there was a pin with the wire bunched around the bottom. So I straightened the wire and wrapped it correctly with my seldom used wire wrap tool. That thing never failed again. Hans was so happy he could read and write his old tapes again.

I made a program following the code they used to toggle into the old Intel computer to copy files to and from the tape.

[DavidJones-yliq]

Fascinating! This brings back great memories. I worked for Sperry Univac in the 1970 and early 80s as a test engineer. Our facility (Bristol Tn) built peripherals like printers, tape drives, and disc drives. It was the era just before the PC tsunami.

[goobfilmcast]

I was a US Navy Data Systems Technician (DS2) on the USS Forrestal (CV-59) and USS Dale (CG-19/ Terrier Missile platform) and these were the Computers and Periphs that ran the Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS) onboard. We did very little real troubleshooting... if the System "malfunctioned" while underway we became expert card swappers. We used to made keychains out of those small business card-sized circuit boards....if we couldn't repair them down to component-level at the test bench

[trainliker]

I was on the USS Norton Sound 1968-70, and they had a Mark 86 fire control system. (In fact, it was the ship it was originally tested on.) As I recall, it used a Univac 1219. That is actually the militarized designation. The civilian version was the 418-II. The 418-I was the first of the series with the "4" being for the 4-microsecond memory cycle and the "18" being for the 18-bit word. Later variants, like the 418-II were faster though so the "4" didn't represent the actual speed anymore. The first laser gyroscope was sea-tested on the Norton Sound, and I recall being told it also involved a 1219. It had to deal with the same issues of mechanical gyroscopes about the Earth actually being round and not flat. For example, if you circumnavigated the Earth, the gyroscope would think the ship's yaw had gone end over end.

[mercster]

Awesome. Never worked with machines of that vintage, but the sound of a noisy server room sure brings back memories. Wish I was young again.

[rdwatson]

I love that everything slides or folds out for easy access to work on, or just admire. Great design for serviceability.

[terryhair]

I was a Fire Control Technician aboard USS Sellers DDG-11. Worked in the missile computer room. We had these UNIVAC 1219's as our missile fire control computers. I worked on 2 of them for the four years I was aboard. Very reliable! We had a newer I/O console with cassette tapes for program loading so we did not have the large tape handlers shown here. A great piece of nostalgia for me! Thanks!

[jamesgibson]

As a kid in the early 70's my Dad would take me to their computer room at the office. He explained how they managed the parts inventory for a large earth moving company. Absolutely loved the sights, sounds, smells, temperatures and knowing that a couple of years earlier people landed on the moon and excited about what would be next. We eventually got a 300 baud modem.and I played (with miles amd miles of paper rolls) 'moon lander' ('landed like a piece of pocket gnur floating to the floor'...or some such phrase when you nailed it) and 'colossal cave' ( 'you are facing west') that they had programmed in. Great video Fran, ignited lots of memories.

[frenchmarky]

When he unscrews the locking bolt with that little T-wrench so he can slide out the rack it reminds me of '2001' when Dave unlocks the latches on the main door to the computer room.

[billygamer]

All that wire wrap reminded me of a 1960s summer installing audio and signal wiring for a large TV production facility. We used wire wrap and pyramid blocks because the telephone company swore by them for ease of installation, long TBF, and, most importantly, signal quality.

[alpcns]

This brings back some very fond memories. What a beautiful hunk of quality engineering. When I saw it, I thought "that's military hardware" - looks a lot like the military mainframes of my time, early '70's. Lovely stuff. These blinkenlights remain wonderful, and this setup has plenty of them. Thanks Fran!

[bronzelovegod]

Thanks. Interesting video of past machines. I remember these systems for picking and shipping items from a warehouse and a huge printouts for the daily pics. That was in the early '70s

[devinsullivan]

The wattage in noise loss alone.LOL Thanks Fran! Love it!

[wolfganglohrie]

Thanks Fran, great to see this old technics in great condition and operational. Cheers from Sydney, Australia

[smhedge]

Wow, this took me down memory lane. This was the first computer that I worked on when I was in the Navy back in the early 90s. A couple differences I saw were that our teletype and paper tape reader were contained in one unit and the panel that he used to get the software loaded was on the top on ours.

[markbanash]

I wire wrapped a 4K expansion board for my VIC 20 using a diagram I got out of BYTE magazine. I can't imagine the dedication and frustration involved to wire wrap something like this.

[baratono]

I started my IT career programming physics simulations in FORTRAN on a 1200 back in the early 80's. Decks of punch cards and magtape. Took forever to run.

[henrikjensen]

That sort of brings me back, my first programs was done on a Univac 1100, it could handle up to about 100 users i belive, but was rather slow when that happend. There was VDU and punch card access and a couple of printers for output, the fastest printer being 1000 lines a minute on 132 column fanfold