User talk:69.106.254.246

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[edit] A welcome from Statsone

Hello, 69.106.254.246, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions.

Happy editing! statsone 01:26, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] 7070 purpose

I was surprised by your comment about the 7070 as this had a totally different architecture from that of the 650 - 200 registers, IIRC. BTW how about registering, so we know a bit about who you are..! Jpaulm 15:00, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

I understand! Thanks for the clarification! Actually, some Wikipedians respond exactly the way you just did, but others just append to the question, usually indented (one or more colons). I had added your talk page to my watchlist, so I would have known if/when you answered. Jpaulm 01:59, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Fortran & CAS

I checked the 7094 manual; it lists the CAS instruction. It was not dropped. -- RTC 22:14, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

Oh, yes, thanks, User:69.106.254.246, for the reference for the code generated for the IF statement of Fortran II, in the "System Manual for 704 and 709 Fortran" --- (Bob) Wikiklrsc 00:35, 20 September 2006 (UTC) (User talk:Wikiklrsc)

[edit] Category for elderly programmers

You seem to know about a lot of old machines and languages - didn't think there were many of us still around! If you go back as far as unit record, you might find [Ruminations of an Elder Programmer] amusing! (DFDM is an older name for Flow-based programming) Jpaulm 00:52, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your prompt answer! I never ran into a 101! Any chance of getting an image or digitized version of "W.P. Stevens, Using Data Flow for Application Development, Byte, June 1985"? I would pay for your trouble! Jpaulm 14:52, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

I'd be happy to do it, and no need to pay. Problem is that I've lost control of garage. The common 10-ream copy paper boxes are stacked 8 high, without walking space (there used to be space between, but it got filled). So access, even though boxes are labeled, is impossible and my wife just had cancer surgery, so I've got higher priority things to do. I will peek at edges, I know about where the Bytes are, but you should assume than any response from me will be months in the future. With apologies, wasn't much use to preserve all this stuff if I can't get at it!. (btw, I just offered RTC an old Tektronix scope - if he takes that it will clear some of the walking space!). 69.106.254.246 17:47, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

Oh well, if you run across it, it would be marvellous! Thanks anyway! Jpaulm 22:17, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

btw, looking at Flow-based Programming, at first glance seemed just like Unix pipes. (not a Unix type, but I think that's the right term) 69.106.254.246 17:47, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

Yes, there are similarities - I answered that one in the IBM SysJnl many years ago! In fact, aspects of FBP have been independently discovered many times. Jpaulm 22:18, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] About external links

Regarding the IBM 407 edit: As discussed in Wikipedia:Tutorial (External links) and in more detail at Wikipedia:External links, most external links are placed in a separate section at the end of the article. (The most common exception is when the link is used to document the source of a statement, much like a footnote.) Perhaps you weren't aware of the distinction between an internal link (to another Wikipedia article) and and an external like (to another web site). Internal links are most often inline. -R. S. Shaw 05:55, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

"Thanks for the quick reply, but the question above is about an internal link, not external. As best I recall, it looked to me as if you had changed '((IBM)) ((Tabulating machine|tabulating machines))' to '((IBM)) tabulating equipment' and, since the 407 is a tabulating machine, I'm curious why the internal link to IBM is ok, but the internal link to "tabulating machine" was not."

I just assumed you were talking about my edit; the one you describe wasn't mine. It was done by User:146.74.230.239 (see this edit). -R. S. Shaw 23:25, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Sorry for the confusion. As Guy points out below, I did make the edit in question. Apparently my edit base was not the latest version, the result being the inadvertent removal of latest edit, the Tabulating machine link. -R. S. Shaw 19:22, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] List of IBM Products, 701, ... citations

The answer to "I'm new, or a slow learner, or both." is "just new".

The links you put in, as presented, didn't have the feel of citations; they looked more like external links using the "cite web" template. A citation would look like a note with a number in brackets, e.g. [1]; that more obviously looks like a citation, not like a link for the item itself. Having the citation be done as a link for the item name also can't be done if the item name is already a link to a Wikipedia page.

For the List of IBM products page, the format I finally used is probably the closest to the right one - it makes it obvious that the page in question is being linked to as a citation, and supports citations for pages where the item links to a page for the device (see the version I put in for the IBM 029). Yes, they're external links, but so are "cite web" items - anything that links to a non-Wikipedia site is an external link, and has the little "box with an arrow pointing to the upper right" glyph to note that. It's not that all external links in the body of the article are bad; anything that's a citation is OK, whether it's done as [1] or IBM 85 collator page at the IBM archive. The first of those is a bit cleaner (less extra text cluttering up the entry), and doesn't put that annoying extra period in.

If you use "cite web", it's probably best to use the "ref" tag stuff to put the actual links in a "References" section at the end, for the same reasons.

As for the broader questions about List of IBM products, I don't see any comments from you on that page - perhaps I've missed it. In any case, you should probably put all those comments into the "Eclectic list" section on that page.

BTW, I think R. S. Shaw's confused about the removal of the link to tabulating machine, so I put that link back. The edit by User:146.74.230.239 put that link in; a subsequent edit by him took it out. That might have been unintentional, e.g. a result of editing an older version of the page. Guy Harris 21:52, 24 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] IBM systems vs. IBM CPUs

In the case of models of the System/360 and System/370 lines, the List of IBM products page lists the CPU, rather than the system; there's an item for the IBM 2030 CPU, for example, rather than for the System/360 Model 30. On the other hand, in the case of the IBM 1130, there's an entry for the system, not for the IBM 1131 CPU.

So there's no clear precedent for how to handle various members of the 1400 series - list the CPU and other components, or list the entire system, or both? Guy Harris 16:16, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

It appears to me that for almost all the modern machines, listed under "Computers based on microprocessor CPUs (1981 to present)", the IBM Products listing is only for the system -- all details are with the system article.

We should do the same for earlier sytems. For example, the IBM 1400 series article should list the 14xx components and those components should appear nowhere else (unless used by another system). 69.106.254.246 18:36, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] IBM 7750

A (PostScript) paper says, on page 23, that the IBM 7750 was "a programmable communications control unit so difficult to handle that there were reportedly fewer than a dozen people who had ever programmed it successfully!" The section it's in is called "Tales of the IBM 3704/3705", so it sounds as if it's similar to the IBM 3705, i.e. that it's a communications controller with a computer inside running it. (The author speaks more highly of the S/360 communications controllers, the 2701/2702/2703, as they were hardwired and didn't require "a genius specialist" to develop software that worked with them - "highly intelligent people" could do the job, presumably because they only had to write software for the main CPU, not also software for the communications controller.) Here's a non-PostScript version of Mr. Tuttle's memoirs, if you don't have software that can handle PostScript.

So it probably should be treated the same way the 3705 was treated - and that's in the "Input/Output control units" section, as is the 7750. It might have, in theory, been possible to run the 7750 or 3705 as stand-alone computers, but they probably were designed to serve only as programmable communications controllers, and might not have had support for, for example, attaching mass storage units to them, or even card or paper tape readers, so even if native assemblers or compilers had been written for them, if you were developing a program for them, they might have obliged you to type the source code to the entire program in every time you wanted to assemble/compile it. (The assemblers/compilers were probably cross-assemblers/cross-compilers running on a 709x or S/370.) Guy Harris 09:26, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Ack, that's stupid. If any terminals you can connect to a programmable communications controller support reading source code from some medium, such as a paper tape or punched cards, you could put the source code on that medium and read it into a native assembler on the controller - and, if the terminal can also write to the medium (punch to the tape or cards), the result of the assembly could be saved there.
I suspect that IBM might have expected that people would do cross-development on those machines, though. Guy Harris 16:52, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
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