1401: The Dawn of a New Era

What does the 1401 mean? How much rom did it have? Did it use mosfet or bipolar transistors?
Thanks.

wow ... salute ... the compusaur run again !

This was really cool. I'd like to see more videos like this one from this channel. Maybe featuring pieces from the museum.

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.

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.

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.

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!

What did it do though?

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?

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.

How many machines required to do some modern tasks, such as Internet browsing?

so good that someone actualy revived them before its too late. and it becomes forgotten thing of the past

GREAT video, thanks

Great story :)

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 !!!

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

Charles Branscomb died last month, age 90.

Being a 90's child this is so cool!!!

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.

Leaking transistors? Leaking current I hope.

Great to see IBM-history in computer-engineering, all the best in the future for IBM. Thanks.

Francis Underwood.. sorry Kevin Spacey thoroughly destroyed your name.

That was awesome especially how the old engineers helped out, I bet they had a lot of fun memories.

With due respect, going back 50 years would be infinitely easier than going forward 50 years.

Strange to think of a time when the same computer was sold for 12 years.

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 ?

Шедевр инженерии и дизайна.

Thanks for showing again, you can only think forward, if you think backwards, so to say in STEVE JOBS words.

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."

Ha! The same thing happened to IBM in the '90s with PCs. Clones everywhere.

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.

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!!!

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.

NO ONE BID ON IT!!!!@ WTH!!!

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.

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.

OJT VS COLLEGE TRAINED TECHS AND PROGRAMMERS
I have been a college teacher, tech school teacher, on site teacher.
OJT traing courses are 1 to 2 weeks = 4 years of college or 2 years of community college. THE BEST PROGRAMMERS AND TECH'S ARE OJT OR
TECH SCHOOL(6 MONTH SCHOOLS) STUDENTS.

THE WORSE ARE COLLEGE TRAINED STUDENTS. BECAUSE COLLEGE STUDENTS
GET THE WRONG IDEA THAT THEY HAVE A WHOLE SEMESTER TO
DO 3 PROGRAMS!!!

THE BEST TECH I EVER HAD WAS MY MOTHER, WHO I TRAINED IN 3 HOURS TO READ I BM WIRING DIAGRAMS.

THE WORSE 2 TECHS WERE A COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PHD STUDENT(RECOMENDED TO ME BY THE CHAIRMAN OF COLUMBIAS ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING DEPT AND A US AIR FORCE VET TECHNICIAN.


BOTH OF THEM WORKED ON AN IBM PRINTER($40,000 MACHINE WE WERE SELLING) FOR A WEEK AND DID NOTHING THEN QUIT!!!!


WE LATER FOUND OUT THAT THEY STOLEN CHECKS FROM US AND
WERE PASSING THEM AT LOCAL AP SUPERMARKETS.

IT TOOK MY MOTHER(3 HOURS TRAINING) AND ME 2 HOURS TO
TRACE THE WIRING AND FIX THE SHORT THEN SHIP OUT AND
COMPLETE THE $40,000 DOLLAR SALE.

BACK IN THE 1970'S, 1980, 1990'S I HAD A DATA PROCESSING SERVICE
WITH IBM 360-40, 370-135 AND 3 SYSTEM 3'S. I DID ALL THE PROGRAMMING
AND REPAIRS(I HAD BEEN A PARTNER IN A COMPUTER LEASING COMPANY)


I ALWAYS NEEDED PROGRAMMING DONE. IN MY NAIVE DAYS,
I HIRED COLLEGE STUDENTS(FROM BARD, COLUMBIA, HARVARD,
COOPER UNION, COLLEGE OF STATEN ISLAND, MIT) TO DO
FREE LANCE COMPUTER PROGRAMMING ON A PER PROGRAM
BASIS. NONE OF THEM EVER COMPLETED A PROGRAM!!!!


THEY WOULD COME IN PICKUP THE SPEC'S AND NEVER COME BACK.
SO I SWITCHED TO P/T HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS(SOME OF THEM
WORKED FOR ME FOR 3 YEARS UNTILL THEY WENT OFF TO COLLEGE
FOUND A FULL TIME PROGRAMMING JOB.(THEY, LIKE MY MOTHER
COULD LISTEN!! AND TAKE INSTRUCTIONS.

THE IVY LEAGUE BOYS(HARVARD, YALE, MIT, BARD) WERE NOT A
TOTAL LOSS!!!!!(THAT SUMMER)
I HAD A LARGE DATA ENTRY(KEY PUNCH) SERVICE, SO 5 OF THEM
MADE GOOD KEYPUNCH OPERATORS.

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

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!!!!

Where do they get ibm tab cards from?????