I don't see how this whole computer thing is ever going to take off.

Thanks for restoring this machine! Nostalgic... In the 60s I worked inside Cheyenne Mountain writing assembly language for the giant Philco 2000 system with the Philco 212 processor. All discrete transistors on boards... 32K of 48-bit words with an astounding speed of 1 MHz. Over two hundred instructions available. Two instructions per word so we could have assembly language programs with, at most, 64,000 assembly language instructions. We managed to track all satellites in orbit at the time (about 1100) and run differential correction of the orbits three times a day (they get perturbed by solar wind, gravitational anomalies, etc., and the orbit data has to be corrected frequently.) My colleague who was responsible for maintenance of the differential correction module was so pressed for space that he had to locate comments to the computer operators and shorten them to free up a tiny bit of space if he needed a bit more space. Things like "Mount tape 5 on Drive 7" became "Mt 5 - 7." Developing 2000 lines of assembly language (a box of cards) usually took 6 months! Could get only 1 run every two days and usually got back a 200 page core dump showing exactly what was in memory when my program blew up. Took hours to analyze and figure out what went wrong... I also operated and wrote programs for the Philco 1000 off-line system. Later I wrote assembly language for the IBM 360/85. Then I worked on Multics and wrote LOTS of FORTRAN. This was all great fun. Truly enjoyable strangely. Worked my way all the way down to the PC which I am still using and programming in Visual C++ and Android. We have come an incredibly long way in an incredibly short time. No one I worked with envisioned processors like the ones we have in cell phones. I am still enjoying writing code! Great fun!

At age 98, I do remember this system as the very best. IBM was the top of it's game. I still own a select two typewriter. 👍🇺🇸

the irony is that the error display on the blinkenlights is easier to decode than your average MS Windows error code

When I was in college in 1969 as a freshman I took a computer class in Fortran II. Yes, we used an IBM 1401 computer with a card reader and high speed printer. You didn't show the card punch machines though in your video. Those were in a separate room. We also had a separate card deck reader for checking the syntax of the card stack before it went to the computer. Our machine had 16K of core memory and a cycle time of 100us and no video monitor. Today 50 years later, my desktop computer has 32 Giga Byte of memory, 2 Tera Byte of solid state memory (SSD) and a cycle time of 333 Pico Seconds, built in floating point and matrix processors and an ultra high resolution monitor of 1920x1200 pixel 256 color palette, 32" LCD monitor. The old machines did real math and science and the new machines are used for social media and talking on Twitter and Facebook. Has the face of computers changed in 50 years.

The best memories I have with my Dad in the early 70's were of him taking me to the data processing room at the bank where he worked and letting me run some of the machines. I was just a little kid, and the old IBM mainframe equipment was huge. It was like going to the Batcave. The Reader/Sorter was my favorite. It was an amazing thing to watch. At some point I'd usually manage to jam it up. My Dad has been gone for nearly 30 years, but when I'm around computer technology I feel close to him.

This computer is 61 years old. Can people really comprehend how much computer technology has change over 6 decades? Even the first IBM PC was created 20 years after this beast was build.

That compiler was quite an achievement. Memory was really tight so the compiler had to work upside-down-- the source code was kept in memory and the compiler, all 97 passes of it, ran over the source code, making small changes. Unusual, and slow, but it worked.

My father worked for IBM from the early 60's until the 2000's - I remember piles and piles of that huge green printer paper all over the house - him coming home with huge rolls of tape - and those cards - OMG - the cards from HELL! Took me to work with him one Saturday and he actually let me play with the card punch machine. He got in trouble on Monday morning because the card reader person had a pile of cards that simply read "My name is Steven Eddy" - over and over and over. He was a missile and trajectory specialist from the Army and worked on the programing that got the Apollo to the moon and back. Later in his career he designed the program that helped destroy most of the Iraqi SCUD missile mobile launch devices after the SCUD had already been fired by using RADAR to track the missles for a short distance then extrapolating the trajectory information to target the firing position within seconds sending the coordinates to our missles launchers which operated similar to the missles at the start of the Iron Man first movie.

Thank you very much for not only preserving this part of computer history, but get it running again, and filming it! Not everyone can visit all these places, so such videos are an important part of computer heritage. Including the hiccups, like the scene when the central processor goes into error and the operators need to decipher the status indicators. This wakes me up to the high level of reliability we've come to expect from modern cpus ... meltdown notwithstanding.

That exit sign probably has more computing power.

As a programming student I know what it feels when you hit F9 and after a while compilation is complete, but I can only imagine how it was back then when you had to take all your prepared punchcards, load them into a reader and go to printer for results. I can only see that the joy of compiled program is always the same :) And of course the immortal turning it off and on again ;)

You know one of the most impressive things to me is those tape machines. They spin and stop those big heavy reels so quickly and accurately. The level of machining involved would be high even by today's standards.

The guys in the red shirt are the zen masters, the jedi, the keeper of the holy grail of computing! Remember the stories of older programmers when they dropped the stack of cards onto the floor and then had to sort the program again! Reading the memory dump after a program crash was nothing for them. Extremely deep understanding how everything works together.

Wow, what memories. In 1961 to 1965 I was writing code for 1401s and 1410s at Eglin AFB, including an autocoder compiler for a two tape drive 1401-729 configuration, and modifying the 1410 operating system. IBMs 1401 autocoder required 3 drives. Our 1401s could not load code from tape, we needed a small loader deck on cards. Programs were compiled to cards, then loaded and run. Our FORTRAN work was all done on 709, 7090 and 7094 computers. This was primarily ballistics work for the Eglin missile Test range. After getting out of the AF, I joined the University of Wyoming, where our primary box was a Philco 2000.

I wonder- will there be a guy, 50 years in the future, going through extreme efforts, sourcing parts from around the world, to bring an iphone back to life and play flappy bird on it?- like his grandpa used to in the old days? Nice video- I really like that you actually use your stuff and not just stare at it!

I think that the program generated a Hilbert matrix (a notoriously ill-conditioned creature), inverted it, multiplied the inverse with the initial matrix. It's a good test for determining computational accuracy.

Oh my! That brings back memories! I actually operated a 1401 computer in the 1960's.

I was an IBM 1401 programmer back around 1960 writing in Autocoder and Cobol working for WR Grace & Company in New York City. They had an IBM 1401in their shop. It was their newest piece of equipment. Your article mentions multiplying two forty digit numbers taking about 15 minutes. I remember there was a document which included the timeing for each operation. The time to multiply two words was a function of the length of each word. One of the other clowns, not me, set the computer to multiply two LONG words, something like 500 or 1000 digits each. The program would probably still be running today if somebody had not interrupted processing. Oh for the good old days.

I was delighted to find this video. In 1960 I started a co-op program at IBM Rochester and got hired in 1962. One of the first machines I worked on after getting hired was the 1402. It had just been transferred to Rochester for production from Endicott where it was developed. One of the projects I got early on was to try and fix a bad oil leakage problem on the geneva mechanism in the punch station. I finally did make a few design changes that fixed most of it. One of the changes was to put those little vents you see on top of the geneva to release pressure from between the starwheel bearings. To help identify the problem I had the model shop machine a geneva housing out of acrylic so I could see inside while it ran. I still have that model. Nice work guys.

I don't get why people want light and thin notebooks, this seems pretty portable to me...

I started (in the mid 60's) on an IBM 1620-IID -- with disk! FORTRAN IID as well as assembly language. What a trip! For a number of years I bounced back and forth between FORTRAN and assembly code, doing a lot of work re-coding FORTRAN libraries and subroutines into hand-optimized assembly code. Went on to do OS development (in assembler) at SDS (Sigma 5, 6, 7, 9, 560), and DEC (VAX/VMS). Still coding today, mostly in Python (or whatever it takes to do the job). And while the hardware has gotten incredibly more powerful, on the software side, some times printing "I got to #3" is the best we can do for debugging, so many decades later!

These old geeks are having the time of their life... and I'd be there right with them if I lived near by. Spent my early adult life writing Fortran, PL/1, and 360 Assembler code on early IBM 360 series machines. Amazing what we got done on 32K of core and 20M hard drives.

And as Always the good old IT Crowd helped again: " Have you tried turning it 'off' and 'on' again?"

Wish my Dad was still around, he would have seen that and, in a way only he could, explain the problem with expletives added in for good measure! He could read that crap! Thanks for saving these and trying to make them work.

I loved this video. When I began studying computers in 1967, this is what they looked like. I recognize all the equipment in the video (except that modern Tape Emulator), and understand everything the people in the video are saying. I worked my way through college by operating a Honeywell 200 computer which was very similar to the IBM 1401 in the video. I mounted tapes on tape drives, loaded cards into a card reader/punch, and loaded paper into the printer. And I wrote FORTRAN II programs and punched them into cards by using an IBM 026 keypunch just like the one in the video. I loved all of it, and enjoyed learning and using the constantly advancing technologies during my 25-year career as a software engineer.

Love it ! Makes me feel so old. I am 60 years old and first programmed in FORTRAN in 1976 On CDC Cyber 173 machines. Well done.

This is quite amazing. The very first IT class I took in Jr. College was the very last Fortran class taught using cards. I averaged 2 bad cards for every good card. Thanks for bringing back such amazing memories for me. The sound ... the tapes... the green bar.... Funny you had to put a subtitle on the video stating the cards contained the program.

As an undergraduate, I took my first FORTAN course in 2nd year (1978), and was offered a student assistant, and T/A position as a result of my performance in that course. I was working on a CDC-6400, 60 bit word 5.5 bit ASCII ... and punch cards were familiar, if not the most desired input mechansim (we got acess to dialup via acoustic couplers on a terminal which used phone dialup at 300 Baud) ... 1401's were considered obsolete by then ... but this is a FANTASTIC look at how computing began ;-)

I remember traveling to Huntsville to get access to a 7090. The 1401 was used to generate an imput tape of the Fortran simulation that was then run on the 7090. The output tape from the 7090 was then put on the 1401 to generate the printout!

Can't believe I was inside that room on this winter. Unforgettable!

I can tell Mike Albaugh has been around awhile -- he knows how to correctly fold the first sheet!

Pretty incredible that there's more processing power in the camera being used to record this video than there is in all of that amazing hardware. I absolutely love these videos. Great work everyone!

Computer history is fascinating, I remember learning about the ENIAC, vacuum tubes and all. The evolution of information technology has to be among the most exciting of all the sciences. The transistor changed everything. A child powering up a tablet has no idea the power they have in their hands, when the ENIAC powered up, it used so much power it caused a blackout in the city. Salute to all the pioneers still alive in this chat. Thank you for everything.

Boy does this take me back to the summer of ‘74 when I was 17. I was working at a book typesetter in Allentown, and we had a computer like this in the basement. It took up an entire room. The cables were in the floor and the room was kept cool. I love hearing the sounds of these machines running again, thank you so much! If someone had told me back then that 50 years in the future we could create a book on a laptop computer, I wouldn’t have believed it!

This museum tops my bucket list, like it is a must-see before I even graduate. I imagine it's a life-changing experience.

Very nice. Takes me back to my college days where we had an IBM 360 in our Computer Engineering lab. Fortran was the language used by my Chemical Engineering class to study "Chemistry and the Computer." And in 1976, I worked ar IBM in San Jose and one of my jobs was bootstrapping an IBM 369 to run MVS and VM for mainframe printer test operations. The amazing Argonaut 3800 xerographic High Speed Printer Subsystem. I was "acting FE" on 3 units, keeping the operators up to speed and running engineering change tests with production simulations. 20 to 60 boxes of paper per shift. Minimum of half a pallet!!! On each printer.

From now on I will respect all modern PC's that I access. They have such a backstory.

An amazing machine. The lengths the designers, engineers and manufacturers went to run what would be utterly trivial functions now is astounding. Thank you for showing us.

I haven't seen that paper in so long that I forgot it even existed, my memory is going. Just to see dot matrix font again was wonderful thanks.

Wonderful. So nice to see the old computers operational.

I am *seriously* impressed! I could watch this video over and over! My hat is off to you! Thank You for giving me a glimpse into what is (with certainty) a laborious love of computational machines. My arrival in computing was later (System/360, paper *tape* on a teletype, in college it was cards) but I sure do appreciate this awesome restoration!

I love this channel and the restoration community. You guys are like inverse pioneers rediscovering the past and bringing it back to life!

Thank you and everyone involved in this amazing effort to keep these examples from the days of our digital origins running properly and well documented!

This is amazing. When I started my college in 1985, card deck readers and magnetic tape machines were still there to load old programs but it was already antiquated and we never used it. I always wanted to try it out, but I never had a chance to use it. Seeing it’s actually working was just amazing. Thank you for amazing restoration and filming it!

I‘m about to finish my bachelor in computer science, but have never seen one of those computers operating up to now! Only knew them from movies and old pictures.. Thats really impressive! Thank you very much for sharing!

During the first years of the 21st Century, I worked for the US Navy on fire-control systems using digital computers (in the 1970s I was there when the old electro-mechanical fire-control calculators were replaced by digital computers, as the ships went through major overhauls -- much like the STAR TREK ENTERPRISE did from the TV show version to the first movie version). These then-new computers used the large reel-to-reel tapes shown here (exactly the same), though the tape drive machines were much heavier and "Mil-Spec" against shock, water, and so forth (these were warships, after all). By the early 21st Century, getting these tapes was becoming more and more expensive, since almost everybody else had switched over to CD or DVD drives -- after some security problems, thumb drives were forbidden on any US DoD computer, period. So we had to change over the tapes to CDs for the ships I was working on at the time, the FFG-7 Class Guided-Missile Frigates (used by the US and several foreign nations). This involved doing a file-by-file transfer to the CD in the exact same format as was on the tape, faking the tape marks and so forth that the tape generated during writing and reading. Special programs had to be written to create this tape-on-CD image, with appropriate formatting on the CD to allow reading by the modified CD drives replacing the tape drives. We had A LOT OF tapes (different ships had slightly different configurations and each had to have its own tape and, now, CD) and we had to do a complete test verification using our in-house simulators on each new CD to make sure that it was operating properly, then make backup copies, then have ship copies made ready for when the ship replaced its tape drives for CDs -- the ships would need them immediately to finish their overhauls, obviously -- and document and label each one for retrieval in a set of cabinets in our test site and media storage room (out small part of a huge multi-functional building). This took a few months to set up the hardware, create a set of procedures, test them for correctness, do some tests, fix the bugs, then finally go through all of the tapes, the first ones being those for the ships closest to tape drive replacement, and make the several CDs of each one. Only then could we throw out the tapes as the ships converted (we sometimes had to send ships new media due to user or machine error destroying their own copies, so we had to hang onto the tapes until the last possible moment). Lots of interesting work!

Fascinating! Thank you for documenting all this

Thanks so much for the video, I had a spare day in Santa Clara last year while over for a business trip and thought I'd spend an hour browsing through the Computer History Museum, over 6 hours later I was being told they were closing up and I had to leave. Incredible place and the memories it brought back for me were amazing. I started work in mainframes in the late 80's, but by that time they were running disk packs mainly with tape only left for archive/backup. Fascinating to see these early machines working again, well done to all who've helped preserve them.

Wow! We had one of them at the university so late as 1980/1... it was one of the last models manufactured on 1970/1... We used it for some microelectronics simulation in the lab. Great time... thank you very much for share that video. Now let me looking for my all time favorite: Burroughs B6700, the first serious computer I worked on!

This was all very wonderful to see (and hear) again. I learned all of this when I was 14-17. Very exciting time of my life.

Very nice too watch. And congrats for doign all the work to get something like this acutally working again. Honestly, this is the image of computers people had in mind back in the old days. High-tech rooms with lots of complicated machines and lots of blinking lights. And even though even the most simple microcontroller is now much faster, reliable and powerful, in a way these machines look much more impressive than a simple tablet or laptop now.

This makes me immensely happy in a way I can’t really explain. Well done!

Thank you for your service in preserving computer history Mr. Code Wizard

Awesome. I am starting to gain a real appreciation for our forefathers and their computers. I just love the history of them...

So glad I found this! What a wonderful documentary... and it's actually working! I got to see one of these at the Seattle World's Fair in 1962!

The 1401 was before my time. I was a computer operator for the 360/370. The punch card machine at 19:53 really takes me back, however. It's funny how just a few old images and sounds rekindle a cascade of other memories. I clearly remember the raised floors and the tape readers that we used -- very similar to the tape readers shown in this video. Thank you very much for restoring these old machines. I work on cloud systems and massive servers now, as well as embedded systems which seem tiny today but are far more powerful than the IBM and CDC mainframes of my youth. I can personally vouch, however, that as with old cars, knowing how old computer equipment worked really does help you work with new equipment. It may seem odd, but it's the failures that teach you the most. So many of our present ideas will be revealed as mistakes in the future. Looking back helps us remember that lesson, as well as many others. Thanks again.

Nice to see people preserve old tech, no matter how old. Good job!

That tape drive interface is amazing. Nice work!

11:30 "The following is for hardcore fans..." lol you've made it this far in the vid and NOW comes the part for hardcore fans!

These computer are the things which made humanity what it is right now. I respect these people who were behind making these! I love you guys! Mike is a great guy too lol

I remember the systems setup very well, good to see it all in action once again.

Thank you for a great video! I only ever saw this equipment in movies from the 60s and 70s. My maternal great-grandfather was a jacquard loom operator, at the time, a skilled job. Mum’s dad was a driver and delivery man and Mum (only child) was a secretary. My dad’s dad was a stevedore and my dad a welder. Yet I have taken an interest in computers and programming which links back to the jacquard loom.

Just wow. I grew up with Windows 3.1, followed by 95, 98, XP and 7. This old machine is enormous and fascinating considering the time it was built. I only know programming with punched cards by stories from my IT teacher back in school.

It’s turing complete. It can do anything except read the last card.

Very nice to see what you all have done here, cool!

I started programming FORTRAN 4 in the early 80s, I guess university had an IBM360 but I never knew all the operator job done to get my programs ready the next day, now I got it!, I still remember doing my flow diagrams and get cards perforated in an old fashion card writer desk and my job card as the first card in the deck! Thanks for sharing!

Genuinely thrilling - amazing job!

This is quite something to see in action.

Amazing. Having started out on Mainframes (albeit ICL 2900s on VME/B and VME/K), this brought back so many happy memories of working in a Machine Hall at ICL Bracknell (BRA01) as a Junior Oper ,, remembering all the sights and sounds of those wonderful early days ... Thank you.

The 1401 was the first computer that I learned to program and operate back in 1967 at college. That one had a disk drive which made things a bit more "friendly". Thanks for the memories!

It'd be really funny to record a phone call with IBM for technical support on the 1401 today! I wonder what they'd say.

"Good afternoon Hal, how is everything going?" "Good afternoon Mr Amer. Everything's going extremely well." 🔴 ... "Just a moment. Just a moment. I've just picked up a fault in the AE-35 unit"

Congrats, guys. Mike Albaugh helped me program the SS-90 a few years ago.

This is so cool!! What an aesthetic, it looks so beautiful (you can literally see and hear it think)

I developed software written in EasyCoder for the 1401 card system, (no disk), from 1964 - 1965; then used Autocoder on a 1401 disk system from 1965 through 1970. Great era to be a progammer.

For all those hipsters who can't fit their fancy Kotlin code in 4 GB of RAM, the punishment should be to work on these. That will teach you optimizations.

I started my IT career as an operator of a "small" IBM 360/25. We loaded a 1401 emulator into the 360 and ran old business applications. This video brings back old memories; card readers, punches, sorters and line printers. Thanks!

Very intersting to see these early machines and how big they were and how little they could do with what we expect or smart watch to do these days great videos love the work need to preserve this history.

I'm amazed how sci-fi this looks. Seeing these mechanical machines move, makes this compter look extremely high-tech and futuristic. The amazing abrupt movement patterns of the tape-machines, moving with what looks like amazing speed and accuracy... and the same perceived amazing speed and accuracy (and noise) of the printer and punchcard machine... Being able to see these parts move gives a whole different feeling to a computer. And while you can't see the CPU work, the buttons and light and just knowing that it controls the rest of the machines that you CAN see working, makes it seem majestic and all-controling (i now see where the "evil AI" idea comes from... :)). *THIS LOOKS LIKE THE FUTURE!!!* The sheer size of it all also helps making it look very important and powerful.

So you essentially had to emulate an FPU on a machine that didn’t have one, yes? That’s seriously cool! And that tape-emulator hardware!! Wow!!! This is so incredibly impressive!!

Great job, guys! Worked on the IRIS-50/80/SIRIS OS (French) mainframes back in the early '80s, felt nostalgic seeing this. So entertaining this clip! Cheers!

Watching this video was really, really fun. Reminds me of my FORTRAN course at the university of Aachen in the 1980ies. We still had to punch the code on cards. Two fellow students and myself developed the code on paper, cut the listing into thirds, each student typed in a third of the code, we merged the three decks and triplicated it as each student had to pass in his/her own deck of cards. It happened quite often that one of the programs returned with a syntax error due to an incorrectly punched hole when we checked the results the next day.

Now that is a real computer right there :-)

That loud screech, throughout the video, would drive me nuts after awhile!

Thanks for sharing this video with us! I really enjoyed watching this “ big iron “ machine run again!

I started working on computers in 1967, Although it was with a different brand, we had the same kind of card reader, tape reader, line printer, etc. and I started learning to program with Fortan II. This video brings me back many memories !

"It works now, Not sure what happened the first time" Story of my life, I guess some things haven't changes since the IBM 1401

Compiling by parchment and quill. I don't miss the batch days one "bit".

Stumbled on this. My first time programming was on an IBM1401. Brings back memories.

Cool. This brings back my college days at DeVry and writing programs to work on the IBM 1401, the large tape drives, hish speed chain driven printer, and IBM punch card machines to load our programs. It was fun back then and DeVry also had a huge Disk Drive which the instructors used. All the huge wiring was under a drop floor to connect to all the devices. Thanks for the memories of my computer school days.

I love that game: Team Fortran 2

It would be a good idea to pull the write ring on that compiler tape, now that you know it works. :-)

My first computer exposure was a 1620 and 1401 at a local junior college. I was using punch cards for about 3 years. Its good to see the history preserved with working demonstrations. Kudos to the team pulling all these elements together.

This reminds me of my dad's old work when I was a kid in the early 80s. So many tape drive cabinets. All you'd hear is tape drives roaring and dot matrix printers printing, and ill never forget that smell. It just smelled so clean. Like new electronics.

"I am now going to tell the computer exactly what it can do with a life times worth of chocolate"

Amazing! I wonder how easy it would be to do up a 1401-compatible ASCII art Mandelbrot printing program in FORTRAN II. I know there's at least one Fortran 95 program on github that allows this, and this led me to find a book on archive.org stating there's actually FORTRAN IV released for the 1401... so I guess the next challenge that I can at least see fit, would be running FORTRAN IV and doing pretty ASCII art Mandelbrots with it :D

it is mind boggling to understand the procedure of operating these computers but it is amazing to dive back in time to see how much we’ve progressed. Everyone takes technology for granted now and forgets the struggles of the past. Props to everyone that keeps these machines up and running.

That is so awesome! Nice work. One of my first jobs was working with an IBM mainframe.

To understand exactly what the 1401 is doing in this video, it's useful to read a short and very easy book by J.A.N. Lee titled "Anatomy of a Compiler." It describes all 63 of the phases of the 1401 compiler in loving detail, and in the process describes most of the functions which all compilers perform to the current day. A note about the use of Fortran (FORTRAN II, by the way, not FORTRAN IV) on the 1401: one of the parameters that could be set was "how many digits should we use for a number?" Because this computer is variable word-length, you could tell a 16KC machine like this to use number cells of (say) 4,000 digits, so long as you only wanted to store four of them plus a minimal program. But this made it a fun system on which to calculate pi to a lot of places, or to calculate some very large prime numbers (very slowly). For its time, the IBM 1401 was a wonderful and advanced computer and it is still a lesson in computer design that students should learn.