General Electric Computer Department
from the bottom up
1961 through 1965

General Electric Computer Department. - I was there January 1961 to January 1966
What promise!! - what happened??

Contents:

Introduction U.S. Computing Environment (ecology ;-) in 1960, in brief Two perspectives Top-Down "High Level" (briefly), Bottom-Up, ;-)) Rudderless Post Adolescent - me - new engineer - off to G.E. Phoenix & Computer School :-)) OK - what is a GE-225? - Documents Available on-line - Steven Spielberg's father designed the G.E. 225 - circuit cards We're Off to Fix Computers ... :-)) Life on a G.E. Computer site Air Products, Trexlertown, PA A Year at Ellwood City a U.S. Steel town And 2.5 years in Phoenix HQ of GE Computer Department Leaving GE - January 1966 G.E. 225 peripherals - listed in order of crappyness Why the Krappy Peripherals? And let's not forget "cost improvements"!! Long Live Dilbert!! - How can Scott Adams get it (his cartoon strip) so right?? GE 225 vs. IBM 1401 probable main competition. G.E. Marginalized by the IBM 360 Blame Game?? - who/what caused the failure of the GE Computer Department Early GE Time Sharing - a side view ;-)) Mail Bag G.E. Computer Time Line A History of CPM and PERT programs

Introduction

Warning - This monologue/tirade of G.E. sounds like a crotchety old man discussing archaic computing equipment. Well, I sounded the same when "IBM cards" were in and I was a new daddy instead of a grandpop. In the glory days of computing - before the current standardization on the Intel 80486 architecture and Microsoft Windows - life was interesting. Any company that wanted a stock price surge announced it was getting into the computer business, hired a computer architect and some engineers that wanted to do something different, produced a computer that functioned, provided some EOM peripherals, sold a few systems, realized life was tough, and sold its computer operation for "pennies on the dollar". (And often the stock price jumped then also ;-)) Also - anyone who could spell the first four letters of "Computer" could get a good paying interesting job ;-)) Now you have to be able to talk "tail recursion", "stack frame", "memory leak" and other odd topics :-(( - and if you can't program in the language of the month, C++, JAVA, PYTHON, Lua ... , forget it.

U.S. Computing Environment (ecology ;-) in 1960, in brief

1951, March 31	The first UNIVAC was delivered to the United States Census Bureau * * Soon "UNIVAC" and "Computer" were used interchangeably. This jarred the data processing giant IBM, which regarded the Census Bureau as its private domain - Then Prudential Life ordered a UNIVAC and IBM began to scramble.
1953, April 7	IBM formally unveiled to the public the 701 Electronic Data Processing Machines. * *
...	...
1960	Now, there were * - Snow White (IBM) - (with a broad line of successful computing products) and - the Seven Dwarfs - SperryRandUNIVAC (having stumbled badly), General Electric, National Cash Register, RCA, Burroughs, SperryRandUnivac, Minneapolis Honeywell, and Bendix, Philco, Royal McBee, Monroe Calculating Co., and so on GE had the deepest pockets ( very handy ;-)) - but unknown to most, the lowest corporate commitment - The General Electric "Computer Division" was a boot-leg project

From a high level perspective, "Top-Down", I suggest:

GE COMPUTER DEPARTMENT - Event (Time) Line added Oct 2008, (Local copy) may help explain why this bootleg operation was always in money trouble, and therefore involved with such horrible peripherals. "King of the Seven Dwarfs: General Electric's Ambiguous Challenge to the Computer Industry" by Homer R. Oldfield - IEEE May,1996 ISBN: 0818673834 Here is a synopsis of the first 100 pages of the of the above book, and a discussion of the boot-leg creation of the "GE Computer Department". George E. Snively's corrections to King of the Seven Dwarfs. Note that George says that Homer ("Barney") ?bootlegged? the GE computer business and was fired when GE?s Chairman, Ralph Cordiner ? who had consistently rejected proposals for GE to enter the business - learned of it. A local backup copy Three articles in "IEEE Annals of the History of Computing" Volume 17, Number 4, Winter 1995. Articles are by J.A.N. Lee, H.R. Oldfield, and John Couleur. "My Adventures with Dwarfs: A Personal History in Mainframe Computers", by Russ McGee, released by the Charles Babbage Institute. (His involvement with GE Computer Department start on page 73.) on-line book in Adobe PDF format at: http://www.cbi.umn.edu/hostedpublications/index.html. Local copy. Note that McGee's paper follows the lines of Oldfield's book rather than Snively's corrections :-| But says all occurred before his arrival in Phoenix in Feb 1961 - about the time I arrived. GE Computer Department Data_Book contains material 1957 through 1960 date - 10 MByte .pdf

And I wish to contribute G.E. Marginalized by the IBM 360

However, I did not get to view the world from the top down,
- I am a bottom-upper, and have a perspective as to

why the G.E. field maintenance costs were so high. - It is easy to argue that there was 1.5 field engineers per G.E. 225 computer site - - and 0.3 IBM Customer Engineers (CEs) per equivalent IBM 1401 and why GE Computer Department had almost *NO* repeat customers! - (G.E.'s only repeat customer seems to have been the U.S. Army at Huntsville, - - happy enough with their paper tape GE-225 system to order more. - - Their 225 was used as a high speed data logger for Saturn rocket development, - - not a business machine application.) - A second customer did reorder, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce - A third customer did reorder, Virginia National Bank

Rudderless Post Adolescent - me -

---

OK - what is a GE-225?

GE-225System Picture	For computer affectionatos, the machine was all transistors, except for 2D21 thyratrons in the tape units. The CPU had a 20 bit word, 8 K word (24 K character) memory with 21 microsecond cycle time with 3 core based index registers. (This is effectively 20,000 times slower than your PC and with about 10,000 times less memory. And about 4,000 times more expensive to buy in adjusted dollars.) You could buy a 16 K word memory. More system details at GE-225 Operator's Manual and BRL publication, 4 page customer handout - 759 KByte .pdf, GE-225 System Manual - CPB-98A date 7/61 - 10.5 MByte .pdf It, like most transistor computers was very reliable - maybe 1 transistor failed in two months. Typical GE-225 circuit cards It was a competitive mid-speed computer at the time. The killers were the poor to horrible peripherals.
GE-235System Picture	Here is a GE-235 System Manual. A GE-235 was a code and peripheral compatible three times faster re-implementation of the 225 with faster, more compact logic.
	A real GE 225 exists :-))

There is a GE-2xx family price/performance chart in BitSavers in GE_Computer_History_1950s.pdf

Documents Available on-line
"Scans" of many 225 documents exist on Bit Savers ... GE-2xx
currently (Aug 2010) including

Also, Wilber Williams < travelmate800@live.com.au > has a collection at http://wwcm.synology.me/scanned.html, copied into here January 2023
ALL of the files were compressed by ILovePDF.com - medium compression

A comment on a G.E 2xx architectural "detail", by Grant Saviers

My experience with a GE 215 or 205 (I forget the model number) was interesting and indicative of GE's future in the computer industry. A graduate course I was taking required a project on the EE dept. GE/EAI hybrid computer. A really ugly concoction of scaling and programming issues. I'll never forget the sign hanging on the GE console: "Please do not divide by negative integers as it hangs the computer so badly you will need to do a power on/off reset." It then listed the code in FORTRAN II to check for negative divisors and to get the right sign on the result. That code needed to be inserted before every divide operation. Fortunately, neither GE nor hybrid computing went much further. Grant

I propose that almost anyone can make a functional computer from commercially available parts. Heck, my "youngest" son made and demoed this. Well, OK - the really high end requires a genius like Seymour Cray. And OK, cost effectiveness and maintainability require some due diligence. But usually, bright normal people assemble existing tinker-toys and get the collection to work at an acceptable speed.

*HOWEVER* I also propose that creating effective, reliable, easy to use peripherals is not so easy nor so common.

Steven Spielberg's father designed the G.E. 225

March 2020   - and would you believe that Arnold Sielberg is 103 years old? After all the rather negative comments I made above, I have some information about the designer of the GE-225 computer :-) not the peripherals :-(( https://www.ge.com/reports/jurassic-hardware-steven-spielbergs-father-was-a-computing-pioneer/ (local copy) who left G.E. in the spring of 1963, just before I returned to a job in G.E. H.Q. Phoenix. (I didn't find who designed the GE-225 computer until years later.) A Computer History Museum podcast about Arnold Spielberg's previous point-of-sales system - recorded in 1988. These are some of the circuit cards whose sockets are wired together (by Gardner Denver machines) to make the G.E. 225. - see Automated wire wrapping - Parameters_for_Programming_the_Gardner-Denver_Automatic_Wire-Wrap_Machine - Gardner Denver wire wrap machine

Emulating the LGP-30 computers being replaced Real world engineering computing How to play at work ;-)) Remote diagnosis down to the slot Tit for Tat - Hot Stuff Hot Stuff, An Air Conditioning story Hot Stuff, Temperature and Voltage Operating Margins, the techie view point Hot Stuff, Card alignment and other Operating Margins Who cares, its Christmas Break Headquarters types The mis-used relay caused fits Turf War vs IBM 1401 operation downstairs My impression of Carroll Claitor Manager of scientific computing The G.E. 225 computer site at Air Products Inc. in Trexlertown, PA was "typical" or "average" - although the Auxiliary Arithmetic Unit was not common. Air Products ordered: A G.E. 225 computer with 8 K 20 bit words of 21 microsecond memory - 3 connected refrigerator sized cabinets with operator's panel and print out typewriter. An Elliott Brothers card reader, 400 per minute An IBM 523 Card Punch, about 60 per minute An Auxiliary Arithmetic Unit - for hardware floating point - in 2 connected refrigerator sized cabinets 40 bit floating operations took 1 to 3 milliseconds. Four Ampex tape drives - density 200 bits/inch - state of the art at the time. A tape controller in a refrigerator size cabinet An Anelex drum type printer - 900 lines/minute, 120 columns wide A printer controller in a refrigerator size cabinet A paper tape reader, not the one seen in the sales brochures A service contract which included Service Manuals, Schematic diagrams, test programs in deck form, and a plentiful supplies of spare computer cards, transistors, nuts&bolts, hand tools, soldering equipment, Tektronix oscilloscope, ... for the G.E. Field Engineer (me ;-) Backordered - a paper tape punch and controller. A GE computer is found. w/ pictures Air Products had prepared a in a nice room with white raised floor and acoustic hanging ceiling. There were no glass walls for VIPs ;-)) The printer, printer controller, and card punch were in a side room also on raised floor with no door - for reduced noise for the operators. We unloaded the cabinets and boxes from a padded furniture van and took them up the freight elevator to the second floor - the engineering area. (The first floor was for business, and had an IBM 1401 system for business purposes.) A small room off the main room , with door, also on raised floor for convenience, contained the Field Engineer's supplies from G.E. (above) and work bench, various cabinets, shelves, ... The customer was responsible for supplying a desk and chair. I bolted the cabinets together, connected the interconnects and cables, and in a few days the computing system passed all its diagnostic tests and was running customer assemblies and production runs. (The customer had access to some East Coast G.E. computer site during the order and installation period to enable a rapid start of productive programs.) Emulating the LGP-30 computers being replaced Part of the contract was that the GE-225 run, in emulation mode, the programs currently being run on the two LGP-30 computers now doing the inhouse scientific computing. About two days after the system was delivered to Air Products, a GE Applications Engineer arrived. Introducing Ruben Munz - business suit, cowboy boots, no hat, full of bounce, and ready to test his LGP-30 emulation in the real world. He would read in his emulation routine via the card reader, start reading the paper tape containing the LGP-30 program and data, and look for the result on the line printer. There was a persistent error on one tape. A particular paper tape frame was reading one bit incorrectly. The LGP-30 used pins to sense holes (10 characters per second) and we used a photo reader (much faster, maybe 60 characters per second) but the yellow paper tape was apparently translucent enough to cause this problem. We decided to leave the paper tape gain adjustments as specified, and had Air Products repunch the paper tapes into black paper tape stock. The emulation system now worked flawlessly and quickly. In 15 minutes, the GE-225 running emulation mode, with floating point subroutine calls trapped to go to the AAU, could do a full night's production of the two little LGP-30s. (I felt slightly bad about that because I had played too extensively with my college's LGP-30 in my senior year. It was a fun machine :-)) (Ruben Munz also taught me how to speed up the code produced by the COBOL compiler.) This customer, Carroll Claitor, readily accepted the fact that the machine was working as advertised - he was developing software and running production runs most of every day - and (after a visit by salesman Bill Peak) started paying rent or whatever. With in a week, the two cute LGP-30s that our system replaced were gone to no one knew where. Real world engineering computing So - what did Air Products want a "scientific computer" for anyway? This computer was not just a prestige item to show customers, Air Products was a hard working, competitive (against the larger, well financed Linde Air Reduction) firm, wishing to grow and prosper. Air Products was in the business of producing compressed and liquefied gasses from air for medical and industrial purposes. (They also had an active helium program.)    - Liquid nitrogen for cooling things,    - liquid and compressed oxygen for burning things and iron,    - argon, neon & krypton I presume,    - and liquid helium, hydrogen and oxygen for the booming defense and space efforts. Air Products was in an expanding industry, knew it, and was eager for lower costs, sharper pricing, and more market share ;-)) Several computational things could help their business: designing more efficient, less costly heat exchangers for liquefying air designing efficient, economical fractionating columns (bubble towers) for separating the various air components "CPM" (Critical Path Method) ( also A History of CPM and PERT programs ) to aid planning and ordering/construction scheduling of new Air Products factories to contain/utilize the above production tools - the GE-225 apparently had a good package as many customers went the GE data centers to run their problems. The walls in engineering were papered with paper of events in time sequence, when to order or start what, what had to be complete before which could begin that installation, ... Some of the diagrams were at least 30 feet long, with red lines (critical paths), green lines, changes, ... A useful version of "Linear Programming" using the newly developed "Simplex Method" of optimizing production was available. Inputting production and equipment and cost constraints, the program developed an optimal cost or production solution. The first two above were standard engineering challenges and there were FORTRAN packages and locally developed software to help optimize the designs. Items 3 and 4 (above) sold many GE machines to engineering customers. Due to memory constraints, 4 tape drives were mandatory for solution of practical sized problems. How to play at work ;-)) So, this was my site. For the first time I was alone - in the Army Nike Ajax missile battery there were several technicians able to do what I was trained to do. Now I was solely responsible. If I did well, (superior up-time percentage) good things - I was delighted :-)) Fortunately the equipment was moderately reliable. The customer used the machine from about 7:30 AM towards 6 at night. There was no time clock on the machine - he could use it 24/7 if he wished, but he was paying for one shift Field Engineering coverage. Soon I was on the machine all night, programming, my all time favorite hobby, and was on call but asleep during the day. The customer was agreeable with this schedule as I lived about 10 minutes away and could be rolling in my car 5 minutes after the beginning of a call. A side benefit to the customer was that the equipment was well exercised and I retained/increased my knowledge of it continually. He also got free weekend coverage as I was around to play then also. I remember asking the customer if I could have a particular weekend off call to visit New York :-| If the peripheral equipment around the computer, such as the card reader and the tape units, had been reliable, life would have been even better. I could have played at work even more ;-)) But my techie life was good :-)) Remote diagnosis down to the slot As part of my effort to provide superior up-time, I printed out a label for each card location, and scotch taped the label onto the card in that slot. This helped return the machine to a known state if someone got into swapping cards chasing a problem. So I was again made aware of the location of the adder in the 225. (Each card in the adder handled two bits and carries in that not dense discrete logic.) There were 10 cards to implement the 20 bit adder. About a week later, the customer supervisor called me at home saying "bit 13 in your adder does not work". (Did I say the staff was SHARP?). Like a fireman hearing the gong I was awake trying to remember where the components of that adder were. So I told the supervisor where to find what kind of card in my spares, and where to replace the card. In a few minutes he reported and all was just fine again, the new card worked just fine. Like a good Plains Indian Warrior, I had counted coup - had bragging rights ;-)) I also was SHARP !! Also - Most folks didn't trust boards sent out from Phoenix. Many were dead on arrival - like sent in defective from some site, not checked at headquarters, and just sent out to some other poor unsuspecting site. (Probably a "Cost Improvement" for some department in headquarters.) Some guys put on small marks so they would know if headquarters returned some dog to them. I tested all my spares, and any boards sent from Phoenix, in the computer. If defective, there were most types of transistors used in the 225 in the site supplies, and a soldering "iron". Others noticed that my site (Air Products) had a higher uptime than most. (This was honest up-time, not some negotiated deal.) And folks were aware that the computational chief - Carroll Claitor - was no push over - Soon my supervisor (Bob Kessler) heard that my tape diagnostics were finding weakness that the regular tape tests did not find. If your tape system passed my tape servo test, customer runs were not likely to fail from a misadjusted tape servo damper. I handed out other exercise routines that helped test the incoming reels of tape from GE and locate bad spots before they interfered with customer runs. (GE was getting really poorly manufactured tape, "warranting" that it would work, and customers were having a lot of trouble with the stuff.) I got to travel our district (eastern Pennsylvania) to help install sites and help if there was trouble. Tit for Tat - Hot Stuff - well, maybe - One night I was playing at programming and the machine failed - it would not even run any standard diagnostic programs, but would pass all the little tests I would put in via the front panel switches. I was stumped !! About 2 AM I started to get seriously worried - I had no clue - no new ideas - this was not good - and the customer was coming in about 7:30 AM and expected a working machine !! I had a friend servicing the GE Missile and Space Site in King of Prussia, PA, just north of Philadelphia - about 50 miles away - I had helped install his machine. I called his home, waking him up, and I think I offered him my first born child if he would come right away and bail me out. He came anyway. About 3:30 AM he shows up and looks at my machine - and about five minutes later announced that the bit 8 carry in the program counter was not getting into bit 9. A quick card change fixed the problem, and back to home and bed he went. I was humiliated !!! How could I ever live this down?? Fate lends a hand - Not three weeks later, I get a call from my supervisor asking if it was convenient for me to got down to King of Prussia to help with a disabled Mag Tape Controller. The site was down hard - the customer HAD to have the tape system working - of course. So, hat in hand, ready to eat humble pie, I went 50 miles to help my King of Prussia friend - and would you believe? Just watching the tape controller lights I figured out the problem - in say 10 minutes - can you believe that?? Sometimes the fates are kind !! In any case, any time I think I'm HOT STUFF, I try to remember the above story. Hot Stuff, An Air Conditioning story Background: This generation of medium size and large size computers were (in general) cooled by air blown up through the circuit cards, ideally from below the raised floor - the computers ideally resting on a raised floor that had slightly pressurized cooling air. Other arrangements could be ordered, bottom mounted cooling fans and so forth. And why air conditioning? Primarily for the punched cards used for input and sometimes output. If the humidity was too high (wet) the cards were limp and tended to warp. If the humidity was too low (dry) the cards tended to warp another way. If a box of cards was highly humid, you aged or rested the card boxes for several hours/days in the new environment. This was especially important with the GE card reader made by Elliott Brothers of England. The cards leaving the read station flew end-wise through the air in the output hopper, hit the other end, and were expected to fall flatly down as the next card came flying by just above it. Any warpage or other problem and you had an output hopper jam with cards out of order, or you could get the cards out of order with out a jam :-| So - air conditioning was for:     1) the data/IBM/Hollerith cards, most important     2) cooling the circuit cards, *my* (germanium) transistors, and other equipment     3) cooling the operators so they didn't drip sweat onto the data cards.     4) cooling the room for any visiting VIPs     5) other, including employee/contractor/support comfort Now the Air Products GE Computer Room Air Conditioner story Air Products had a proper raised floor and good layout. The air conditioner and fan was on the roof, just above our second floor location, properly designed, installed and operating - for once "no sweat" ;-)) But after a few months, I started taking Saturday morning calls, my machine was broken. I would rush in - and find the room quite warm, and no air blowing through the cabinets to cool *my* transistors. !! For superior up-time, *MY* (germanium) transistors *WILL* stay cool!!! The first time no one could figure the access to the roof to turn on the air conditioner. Nothing to do but tell everyone to go home. The following Monday I/we got roof access figured out, and I put a sign on the switch to leave the GE Computer Room air conditioner on all the time. The next Saturday I took an identical call. I rushed in an up to the roof. (A friendly janitor had let me duplicate his key. ;-) There was the air conditioning switch, sign removed, in the OFF position. So the following Monday Carroll Claitor wrote a note to all suspect groups that the GE Computer Room air conditioner was to be left running except in the case of emergency. And I taped on a larger RED sign on the switch. The following Saturday I took an identical call. I rushed in an up to the roof. That switch was OFF again, and my sign crumpled and discarded near by. - OK, - TWO can play this game!! I turned ON the switch, got my handy hack saw and sawed off the switch handle with the switch in the ON position. As you might guess, the next Monday there was a certain amount of tenseness - One maintenance group had complained that I had no right to saw off "their" switch handle!! The situation was resolved by moving the Air Conditioner switch to the entrance of the GE Computer Room, near the light switch.     - Turn it ON when you come in to start the computer,     - OFF if you turn off the machine to go home. :-)) - Building Maintenance was happy about the reduced electric cost, - Engineering Computations or what ever was happy with more access to their computer, - and so was I :-)) Hot Stuff, Temperature and Voltage Operating Margins, the techie view point Business types talk of Operating Margins as some difference between production cost and selling price. Techie types talk of Operating Margins as the difference between normal conditions and conditions of temperature, voltage, illumination, vibration, ... that cause a device to not perform properly. To help assure superior up-time, I wanted my Operating Margins to be a wide as practical. If the nominal air temperature was say 70 degrees, I wanted the machine to be fully functional over the normal air temperatures given by the air conditioner as it cycles ON and OFF. So, every month or so I would (at night) slowly lower the thermostat set-point until something failed, fix that something, then lower again, ... until I reach about 50 degrees. Then I would play the temperature game again on the up side until satisfactory performance at about 90 degrees. (There were thermistors near our core memory stacks to sense/cause modification of drive currents to cope with temperature changes, and they worked well :-)) Then I would play with the voltage regulators on the power supplies through say +- 10 percent. Some "old hand" at the game said to rattle the curcuit cards while running diagnostics. He suggested vibrating the cards by running a pencil or screw driver back and forth across the ends of the cards in the various racks. A vibration sensitive card would temporarily fail, halting the diagnostic test. This helped localize an intermittent several times. With plenty of Operating Margin, I was confident of helping provide Superior Up-Time ;-)) Hot Stuff, Card alignment and other Operating Margins This section is written to help some people trying to keep card readers at a restoration working reliably. There are a number of marginal conditions that are easily checked (if you make the correct tools). (IBM) Card hole alignment One marginal condition is the ability to read cards with holes slightly mis-aligned to the left or right. It is easy to make (horizontal) alignment card test decks. The input hopper of an IBM 523 reproducing punch is easily shifted (say 1/3 hole width) left or right so that reproduced decks have their holes shifted that amount. You can make your own test tools :-)) A properly aligned card reader should be able to read both the left and right shifted test decks, if not make it so - and you will have a more robust card reader :-)) It seemed unnecessary (and more difficult) to shift the test deck holes up and down. Magnetic Tape Servo Test As mentioned all too frequently in these pages, the Magnetic Tape Drives from Ampex were designed for (and apparently satisfactory at) low duty cycle instrument recording. In data processing service, they failed a lot and needed frequent repairs and upgrades. One of the failure modes was the servo system controlling the motors torquing the reels could seem to oscillate causing problems with inter-record gaps and other defects. There was only one available adjustment - the hole size of an air dashpot - and no obvious way to check its adjustment. The system wouldn't work well if the hole was wide open nor if it was completely closed - but no way to verify if other openings were close to optimum :-(( I made a diagnostic that wrote and then read wildly varying tape record lengths, with random pauses up to half a second. This caused the servo arms to swing wildly, and if the dash pot damper was not "optimum" to strike the stops - causing stretched tape and/or improper width inter-record gaps on the tape which would cause read errors during the test. Trials of opening and closing the dashpot air hole could cause the test to "pass" and the Mag Tape Drive more robust. I took my test decks with me when ever I was sent to install or trouble shoot some system in the Eastern Region. (Also a small tape known to be compatible with IBM tape drives.) Who cares, its Christmas Break Headquarters types The scientific computer staff at Air Products was really SHARP. One day I got a call that my Auxiliary Arithmetic Unit was malfunctioning. I raced in to find the supervisor (Ray ??) with a production run case that failed numerically. The supervisor had already entered in a test case into the machine with the front panel switches and the AAU clearly failed in the floating point multiply with these inputs. I ran the GE supplied diagnostic deck, with its test cases and there was no detected error. But clearly the customer's floating point numbers (with exponents near the limit of allowable range, one very large, one very small) did not multiply correctly. I added a test case card to the test deck with the customer parameters and the proper answer (in octal), and now this enhanced test also detected the problem. I swapped and checked the logic cards for weakness. Boards seemed to be working as designed. I checked the wiring in the exponent area, seemed to be proper, no missing or mislocated wires that I could find. I felt stuck - and did not want to get into the design of the AAU - I called my supervisor then Phoenix. (I called Phoenix a lot - ) Phoenix engineering would look at it. Several days and several phone calls later Phoenix said they could duplicate the symptoms, and there was indeed a design problem. The back ordered paper tape punch and logic had just arrived, and I wanted to get that up and running and on revenue quickly. And I really didn't want to reverse engineer that AAU - let the guys who designed it do that. The paper tape punch logic turned out to:     - -not well match the wiring in the chassis they sent me     - - be a work in progress, not complete, outputs to nowhere, inputs from nowhere. I spent my "Christmas Break" re-designing and reimplementing that controller. The unit and punch passed the diagnostics before the customer returned the first week of January :-)) Back to the faulty Auxiliary Arithmetic Unit - Then there was long wait - two week Christmas break for Phoenix. Of course I was getting pressure from Carroll Claitor - why shouldn't he call my AAU "DOWN" since it was capable of supplying bad answers - shades of the Pentium Problem floating point problem many years later - . My self and the salesman and the district manager waffled and weaved - we wanted to stay on revenue, the machine was working as designed, ... Our life was interesting - Carroll probably got some concession from the district manager. FINALLY - A few days after Phoenix came back from Christmas break, I was able to locate the ECO (Engineering Change Order) - in Phoenix. It was on some jerk's desk. It had arrived on his desk before Christmas break, but he saw no need to expedite anything - so he left it there over Christmas break - and what is the big hurry anyway - and why are you being rude? Anyway I got the guy with a bad case of headquartersitis to tell me the wiring changes over the phone with a promise to mail it to me ASAP. I put the wiring changes into the AAU and all was happiness - except my festering hatred of HeadQuarters types. The above type of story was repeated over and over again - There was the tape unit relay problem - Oh - my head hurts - The mis-used relay caused fits All up and down the east coast, people were reporting occasional Mag Tape controller faults. Very long story - no clues - service people and customers were having trouble. Many tape runs were very long - say the sort of the records on a complete reel of tape - might take 6 hours. If in that time, you got an unrecoverable tape error or got a Mag Tape controller fault - you got to start all over again. You could spend all night starting all over again. - I figured that I lost 2 weeks of my life on this problem. Life was HELL. Eyeballing the scopes, where were these brief faults coming from that causes so much grief?? I found out later that a friend of mine, C.T. Winter, had taken spare logic cards, plugged them into unused slots in the Mag Tape controller, wired them up, and tried to trap the source of the problem. Whether this was involved with the solution I do not know - Wish I had thought of it. Constant complaints to Phoenix - no help. Then we all got parcels in the mail - unannounced - new power relays to be inserted in the tape *drives* - the problem was that some contacts used to signal to the controller that the tape drive was powered up were power type contacts, designed to make/break high voltage and current. The replacement relays solved the problem by using wiping signal type contacts that were not so corrosion/vibration sensitive. Nobody told us that a solution to our nightmare had been found and that a fix was on the way - the complaining phone calls were handled by a different group than the fixing group - the left hand and the right hand. Carroll Claitor stated on several occasions that he didn't understand how such a small organization (GE Computer had maybe 4,000 people) could be so bumbling and inept. Possibly Scott Adams says it best here Turf War vs the IBM 1401 operation downstairs The GE-225 was working well enough. Since Air Products could use it 24/7 with no increase in price, there was plenty of free spare capacity just waiting. The IBM 1401 down stairs was metered, use it more than 8 hours/day and you paid for an extra shift. Carroll Claitor pressured management to let his department do some of the work normally performed by the business group down stairs. OK - try the ?weekly? invoicing run. The GE-225 had a reasonable COBOL compiler. Work began to run the IBM 1401 business tapes to generate the Invoicing printout. Unfortunately, the code produced by the GE-225 COBOL compiler was slow. The printer was producing the invoice at about 100 lines per minute rather than at the printer rated speed of 900 lines per minute. Not good enough! I found how the GE salesmen estimated how many records per second a 225 could process. Find the maximum speed of the output device (such as printer or magnetic tape) and assume the computer was fast enough to keep the output device going at full speed. Likely the GE 225 was designed to compete with the IBM 1401. The 225 could haul a 20 bit word out of memory (21 us) in about the same time a 1401 could get 3 characters - The 225 was well adapted for parallel I/O and compute :-)) If a customer complained (loud enough) that the 900 line/minute printer was going at 100 lines/minute instead of full speed during a COBOL written run of importance, an Applications Engineer was sent to hand code in assembly some of the I/O code - to replace calls to the standard I/O routines which were big, generic, and slow. Say you needed to print a date on each bill, three binary numbers to say three decimal 2 digit numbers on a print line. Instead of popping say 13 parameters and addresses onto the stack and calling the generalized I/O routine three times - You could take a binary value into the extended AQ register, divide by 10 convert both registers to the appropriate printer codes - stuff 'em away into the print line, three times and be done in less than 1 % of the time. Do that enough places in the code, and your printer output might go from 100 lines/minute up to 700 lines/minute - enough to pacify the customer :-)) Remember the computer had a memory cycle time of 21 us, at least a thousand times slower than any computer today. So, using tricks I had learned from Ruben Munz, I got into the assembly code produced by the COBOL compiler and replaced calls to generalized formating subroutines (such as converting internal binary numbers to proper sized printable fields) to much faster in-line tailored assembly code. An example would be to convert the binary day of the month to a two character field. This could be done in tailored assembly by a single division by 10, yielding both the quotient (tens digit) and the remainder (units digit). This replaced a 6 parameter call to a lengthy generalized formatting subroutine. Not many of these changes caused the printer to run at about 600 lines per minute, an acceptable rate :-)) Soon we were doing short trial runs on normal paper then on samples of three part paper (with carbon paper in between). Our Anelex printer did about as well on multipart paper as the IBM 1403 printer downstairs. The hammer impacts did smear the characters a bit, and cause slightly discolored rectangles of carbon - but that was state of the art - and satisfactory. The only real trouble was the way the Anelex printer sensed "out of paper". We got around that by taping the four boxes of multipart forms end to end into one continuous form, four boxes long. The acid test - a live run, went well enough, and Carroll Claitor had a foot in the door of the 1401 operation downstairs. Then I went to Disk File school and transferred to a new site in Ellwood City, PA - and missed more Air Products excitement. My impression of Carroll Claitor - Manager of Air Products Inc. Engineering Computing Carroll was a truly memorable, quite unique character. Looked very similar to Barry Goldwater, Arizona Senator and presidential candidate. I don't remember Carroll ever joking, he was unhurried serious. There was a very unique flavor of "we spin nothing here" aspect to him. He was the complete opposite of your used car salesman or (which politician to pick on - ) say Bill Clinton. You look at Bill Clinton, and you know he will hustle you, and you also know that he knows that you know, and he is going to do it anyway. There was a level of Buddha-like calmness in Carroll that was unusual, unique. Yes, the world is imperfect, yes there are problems, and yes we can analyze and deal with them - we shall overcome. I never heard Carroll tell a joke, tell anything approaching a falsehood - there was a calm, forward looking, no nonsense, inevitable pressure. The engineering computing staff, including computer operators, reflected Carroll's image - no jokes, no intentional distortions of reality, solid Germanic work ethic, due diligence, calm confident pressure forward. In the internal battles for turf in Air Products, Carroll had competitors who said interesting things. The thread was that some ?founder? of Air Products had rescued Carroll (an engineering graduate of ?Harvard?) from the literal gutter, brushed him off, and gave Carroll this present position. At the time I dismissed the rumor as silly/vicious - but how does one get a Buddha-like calm in our turbulent world? Has one gone through much worse? has known a bottom? survived? and is confident of better things? The only other person I have known that seemed to have that same quality of deep calm force was Helmut Mach, the Control Data Corporation salesman in Germany who developed a major computer order ($1.3 million 1970 value) from Volkswagen Research in Wolfsburg, Germany. The word about Helmut was that he had been captured by the Soviets in the battle of Stalingrad, survived the horrible German/Soviet conditions, and as a captive of the Soviets until 10 years after the war, had varnished/polished furniture in factories for the upper Communist Party members. Of the 250 thousand Germans captured at Stalingrad, about 13,000 (one in twenty) survived to eventually return to Germany. Helmut had that same calm, forward looking, no nonsense, inevitable pressure. The numbers of Germans captured and eventually returned is highly variable, depending upon the source and date ... Postscript: After I left Air Products for the Ellwood City site, I heard that Carroll Claitor got the GE Philadelphia district manager to replace me with three people. I understand that Carroll Claitor got an IBM 360 (? Mod 50 ??) in the mid 1960's rather than the GE 235 upgrade our district manager wanted to sell him. Maybe Carroll won his battle with Data Processing downstairs and took over more than the invoicing runs ;-))

Leaving GE

G.E. Computer Department was trying to sneak into the general purpose computer business - and it showed!
1. The Elliott Card Reader/Shuffler
2. The tape drives were from Ampex.
3. Decca tape drives were imported from England.
4. Early Disk drives
5. Printers from Anelex
6. High Speed Card Reader
7. G.E. Printer

---

The Document Handler for handling checks was OK. Actually wonderful compared with the other peripherals.
The IBM 523 Card Punch just plain worked !!
The Paper Tape Punch mechanism was from Teletype Corp. never heard of a failure.

---

1. The Elliott Card Reader/Shuffler - the shuffling was unintended !! 400 cards per minute

   The Elliot Card Reader/Shuffler click to enlarge A sharper image from Wilber Williams Another picture and discussion.

   (image from http://www.retrobeep.com/computers/elliott/elliottPeripherals.htm ) For the first two years, the only card reader option for G.E. 225 was the world's second worst card reader - from Elliott Brothers in England (Was there was a worse card reader? open to suggestions). After reading, the cards were ejected into the top of the output hopper (on the left) where they fell to the bottom for manual removal. If the cards were slightly warped you could get a shuffle, and/or a card jam, in the output hopper, and the cards would be out of order for the next operation or pass. There were other serious problems also - like filling the input hopper and emptying the output hopper and mechanical problems, but the above took the cake. G.E. added a thin piece of springy sheet metal about 3/4 inch x 6 inches to the output slot area, extending over into the output hopper on the left of the card reader, to try to deflect the cards down in good order. There was a little screw adjustment to position the springy metal to try increase its effectiveness. If you heard cards hitting each other or there was a card shuffle, you were advised to tweak the adjustment again. Different decks required different adjustments - And occasionally, the back end of the leading card would be hit by the front end of the following card, flipping the leading card over or causing an output hopper jam with cards in all orientations pressing up on the output hopper finger. This machine was a REALLY high maintenance item To help keep mine going, I disassembled it every other weekend and repacked the bearings of the rollers that moved the cards with thick axle grease - which seemed to give sufficient damping of the card moving system for more reliable operation - like not getting mixed up on which column it was reading. - There were two methods of determining which column of the card was being read by the photo cells. The first method was used for the columns near the leading (left) edge of the card, while the card was being pushed by a little pusher arm and before it reached the output rollers. There were slots in the arm that indicated the position of the pusher arm, and hopefully the position of the card - but if there was not enough grease to damp things, the play in the pusher arm would whack the card and the card would bounce off the leading edge and an earlier column (or part of a column) was being read than indicated by the pusher arm slots. The second method was a chopper wheel on the shaft of an output roller. Card column determination was transferred to a counter of the chopper wheel. Dust could collect in the slotted aluminum disk chopper wheel and confuse the column counter - regular cleaning helped reduce this problem There was a check for end of card - if the end of card (all photocells lit) was too early or too late a card read alarm triggered. This check worked fairly well. You of course needed to make programs that could stop, let the operator take the card out of the output hopper, place it at the start of the remaining deck, and signal the program to re-read the last card. This machine was easy to despise!! OH - good grief - I forgot - the only safe way to reload the input hopper or remove cards was to depress the HALT switch on the front panel, then when done with those chores, depress the START button. But some people recommended lowering the REPEAT INSTRUCTION switch to do card manipulations, then raise the switch to continue. This caused havoc to the results if there was an arithmetic instruction going at that time !! On the plus side, the Elliott card reader was evidently cheeep and not too bad if you only wanted to read one card. (Agreement) LaFarr Stuart claims the RCA card reader was worse - Who can tell? LaFarr had worked with IBM equipment and was hired into RCA as an expert. One day the RCA Computer Chief Engineer (with a background in communications) called LaFarr in and asked him what an acceptable error rate was for a card reader - how many errors per thousand cards. LaFarr said that no error was acceptable. The Chief Engineer thought LaFarr did not understand the question. LaFarr proposes the Chief Engineer did not understand the problem. You may contact LaFarr via http://www.zyvra.org/lafarr/.

   ---

2. The tape drives were from Ampex. Rewritten and extended again - July 2007, October 2010

   Earliest drives, without pucker pockets Early Ampex Read/Write head, note steel tape guides :-( Photo by Robert Garner, of his equipment. This is a video of a similar type of drive. Under conditions of many rapid starts and stops, things were more dynamic. When the load handle is pulled, the sense arms go to positions of easy tape threading. detailed pictures of AMPEX TM-4 Tape Transports as used on the ICT 1301, Kent, England www.ict1301.co.uk

   Originally designed for light duty instrumentation recording service - they required a great deal of maintenance to keep serviceable in heavy duty business applications - such as sorts that can take hours of steady tape I/O - maybe 10 records/blocks per second - each record/block requiring a start and a stop - . One of the early symptoms that we were dealing with a light duty machine was the screw threads of the knobs that the operator twisted to mount a tape on the center spindle. After about 3 months of business use, with lots of tape mounting and unmounting, the threads wore and began stripping - making the tape drive unusable until a new nut in the center shaft, and new twist knob was installed. Soon a retrofit arrived, replacing the thread operation with a more robust levered handle. Lots of retrofits trying to convert a light duty easily aged drive to a more robust, low maintenance business data processing drive. Ampex didn't seem concerned that iron oxide is abrasive - the side tape guides were steel. After twenty to thirty hours of tape movement, the magnetic oxide on the magnetic tape cut grooves into the sides of the tape guides. The abraded groves shredded the sides of the tape. Retrofit #1 was to permit the sides of the steel tape guides to rotate, hopefully evening the wear - didn't work as advertised. Retrofit #2 replaced the sides of the tape guides with ceramic. That seemed to work for a while - but then long black threads of (I guess) melted/recooled mag tape began to plague folks - but I was leaving for a Headquarters software job - good luck folks!! Other quirks were, instead of tape vacuum columns (like IBM patented) these drives used vacuum "pucker pockets" to buffer the sudden starts and stops of the tape. The vacuum for the pucker pockets came from regular vacuum cleaner motors. The vacuum cleaner motors were *NOISY*. There was no sound damping in the drive area - so being near four loaded tape units was like standing next to four vacuum cleaners - fatiguing!! Many people (including myself at both sites) bought extra vacuum cleaner hose and mounted the howling motors under the raised floor, which helped a lot. One fire marshal worried about motors under the raised floor, but I ignored his comment and he didn't press the point. Each pucker pocket had slot to permit the vacuum action to work. These slots were very noisy as the air rushed in to fill the vacuum. Fortunately they were mounted in front of the drive main plate so the sound was largely muffled by the transparent plastic door. The brushes on these motors lasted maybe 500 hours, then would start to arc destroying the commutator and causing the drive to fail - hard - like replace the vacuum motor. Of course you should add checking the length of the brushes to your monthly inspection - but there went another 15 minutes per tape drive. OH - YES :-| The tape drives were manufactured in temperate California, and shipped from temperate Arizona. The hardened glass of the pucker pockets was epoxied to steel hinges so the glass could be swung out for cleaning. Unfortunately, the steel and the glass have quite different temperature coefficients of expansion - and if you received a system in a northern winter, the glass pucker pocket covers were usually cracked, and you had to send back to Phoenix for replacements. If the weather stayed cold, the replacements also cracked in shipment. So some regional CE or salesman would fly to Phoenix to hand carry a supply back to the cold region - say Wisconsin or Pennsylvania. Oh - how can I forget - tape drive head alignment - As delivered from GE Phoenix, the heads were often misaligned so much that tape written on one drive could not be read on another drive. One of the things the installation crew would have to do is at least make all the drives on the site interoperable. Preferably, a customer tape from say an IBM system would be used as a reference if the GE system had to exchange tapes with other system. What slop!! Speaking of slop - The tape supplied by GE in mid 1963 was so contaminated (little white surface particles, maybe 1/3 mm, maybe 1 per 5 feet) that the field people were well advised to write the tape from end to end (ignoring errors) several times before the customer used it. That way the stray particles left over from the manufacturing process would be (mostly) scraped off by the retrofit tape cleaners (that looked like the shaver foils from an electric razor). *really* I imagine the only people happy with GE supplied tape were the GE bean counters - I should have mentioned the tape packer arm - to try to solve the "cinch" problem. The different wraps of tape on a reel would sometimes slide over each other, creating sharp wrinkles at 90 degrees to the side of the tape. This crinkle or "cinch" would set in the plastic of the tape and create a little line of tape that couldn't be read later. Adding to the seriousness of the problem, about one in 2^7th cinched records would pass the hardware checking, but not contain all the data originally written.) Years later I found that the IBM 729 tape drive we were competing with had the same problem. :-| Apparently this was a generic magnetic tape problem caused by torquing the reels. I had forgotten why we were so busy - Yet Another Tale :-(( - Our Test & Diagnostics group received a specification (and budget) from GE hardware engineering for a magnetic tape upgrade to 556 bits per inch (bpi) (the next higher density). The specification also included all new op codes for use when using 556 bpi rather than 200 bpi. We were appalled - all the user and GE programs would have to be recoded to use this next higher density :-(( (We were sure other manufacturers were at least more internally compatibile.) Then we started hearing that the "floor techs" (who made the systems work before shipment) were doing a "boot-leg" project, on their own time, to make the mag tape hardware controller also operate at 556 bpi - with out really major hardware and software changes ;-)) Eventually hardware engineering adopted the "floor techs" ideas for the new 2-density controller. :-| See this GE manual, page 2, for the Model 690 with added switch to change between 200 bpi and 556 bpi (555.5 bpi). Also see Ian Upton Reginald W Oldershaw, who later worked at Ampex, mentioned the following Ampex oriented web pages     - Ampex Virtual Museum and Mailing List     - Preliminary Guide to the Ampex Corporation Records, ca. 1944-1999 Online Archive of California, Stanford

   ---

3. Later (on the GE-625) Decca tape drives were imported from England. They used a "scramble bin" instead of the tape columns that IBM used, or pucker pockets that Ampex used.

   But the tapes needed 25 foot leaders and trailers to properly fill the scramble bins -     instead of the usual industry standard 8 foot leaders and trailers. (Interesting compatibility problems with other machines - even other GE machines. Customers had to patch on 20 feet of tape onto the leader and trailer of any standard tape they wanted to use on the G.E. Decca tape drives. How could G.E. engineering "management" be so $%^&*( stupid ??) If there was any fault, a *pulse* was emitted from any of a number of sources to a latch that lit the blue failure light and shut down operations. There was generally no way to determine where that fault pulse came from. C. T. Winter (RIP) tried to get peripheral engineering to make more user friendly electronics - Ha - The systems containing DECCA drives had much more than the usual tendency to stretch and break mag tape - I don't know if it was the English electronics or the added GE electronics. The GE hardware people claimed that the fault was the COBOL SORT, and convinced GE Phoenix management to have the software folks examine the sort generated by COBOL for situations which could cause commands to the tape controller to break tape - I kid you not!! (From the above point) Until GE Phoenix eventually hired an IBM guy (John Haanstra), management had little clue about the realities of data processing. Unfortunately John was killed in a private plane crash after a few months :-(( The GE mantra was that "a good manager can manage anything". Maybe if the product is as simple as a motor or a transformer or a light bulb - but in the complex conflicting arena of data processing, GE managers were only bean counters with no computer industry knowledge to keep them from silly blunders. Eventually a new general manager (?Haanstra?) correctly called the DECCA drives "boat anchors" and consigned them to the appropriate place. I have no clue about what drives replaced the Ampex and DECCA drives -

   ---

4. Early Disk drives - "35 million decimal digits" - M640A - "Mass Random Access Data Storage Unit"

   - OK lots of folks had troubles, but I contend "we" likely had more trouble. As I was leaving the field for Headquarters, there was a team going from site to site with automobile polish to slick up the disk surfaces. Unfortunately, any extra polish tended to slowly build up on the flying heads, destroying their ability to fly. This cure was worse than the original problem. People running the current "Winchester" technology are totally spoiled! And of course, GE had to make a cost improvement that caused a lot of grief for a few months.

   Robert Ollerton has this 31 inch diameter disk which he was told was from a GE-225 system.

   ---

5. Printers from Anelex

   Two major problems: The usual vertical dispersion problem rather than IBM's less obvious horizontal dispersion problem. And the usual user hostile GE controller - If you ran out of paper, the printer controller would reset, destroying the next data line already sent to it. To get that lost line printed you had to re-run the job. IBM went to the extra trouble of sensing out of paper *after* the last line on a form. The just completed form could be removed and the next form inserted just below the print hammers, and life was easy. GE and most others sensed out of paper about 6 inches below the print hammers and life was tough. Really tough when running say payroll, billing, etc. Where several boxes or more of expensive multipart forms were getting printed in one run - customers had to prepare the expected numbers of boxes of paper, tape the beginning and ends of the boxes together into a continuous stream, and start out. "Been there, done that" Also see Ian Upton And expensive, unused logic in the controller - G.E. wanted the 225 to compete with the IBM 1401, which had a Format instruction primarily used for "check protection" - an example being:      "$******43.21" another option being      "$$$$$$$43.21" for the dollar amount which used a programmer defined control field to format the above example. To compete with the IBM 1401, the GE 225 printer controller had a little control memory and considerable logic to do the equivalent formatting. Unfortunately, G.E. COBOL did the formatting in software, ignoring this very complex printer controller feature. The expensive hardware logic was rarely if ever used by G.E. customers. The formatting logic was not tested by "diagnostic tests" used in the field.

   ---

6. And the later High Speed Card Reader

   - This reader actually worked quite well - but was hell on cards. The cards were separated by an air-blast to get individually vacuum picked, transported by speeding belt past photo cells for reading, then stopped in the output section by impacting (smashing) them into a block of steel. The result was that the cards got limp rather than retaining their stiffness - and after about three passes through the High Speed Card Reader you were well advised to reproduce the deck. A deck going through the GE High Speed Card Reader say ten times was guaranteed to give jams of one nature or other. Years later I used a Control Data 504 High Speed Card Reader using the same principle - but with a block of plastic to stop the cards instead of a block of steel - and the cards lasted "forever". In "fairness", the card handling technique was very similar to the quite successful Pitney-Bowles document handler (reads checks at banks) that GE used, then manufactured. BUT,    - the documents went through the machine only once per bank/distribution point    - were much thinner and not supposed to be stiff    - and were much lighter and I presume slowed a lot from friction in the output hoppers.

   ---

7. G.E. Printer

   I heard from other diagnostic programmers that they were testing a new line printer manufactured by G.E. Apparently as the printer mechanisms heated up from continuous printing (normal for printers) the bars holding the print hammers would warp. G.E.'s solution was to add a cooling compressor, with coolant gas running through the warping bars. Evidently the cooling mechanisms were the major failure item. The refrigerator gas would escape and the unit would fail. And OH - Dell Bloom, one of my co-workers was assigned to test another printer which utilized a printer mechanism from Holly - the carburetor people - back when cars had carburetors - His printer exercize program reduced the printer to broken parts in less than an hour. G.E. solved this by allowing the design engineer to ban Dell from going near those printers. The printers were shipped - then the customers reduced the printers to broken parts.

As I was leaving, G.E. tried to make/market a head contact disk, plated with rhodium which was to provide lubrication for the contacting head, that was supposed to be a break-through - well, it just cost G.E. another black eye, lost time, lost money, lost customers, ...

Customers came to hate many GE peripherals, and hardly ever selected GE computers more that once. As much as some folks hated IBM's high handed marketing and prices, at least their equipment worked well and was maintained well.

Customers were caught between the Devil (GE) and the Deep Blue Sea (IBM).

---

The Document Handler for handling checks was OK.

A video showing Potter document handlers attached to a GE-210 - starting at minute 5. GE 12-Pocket Document Handler

The 1200/minute G.E. "Document Handler" for handling bank checks was really quite good, could usually run all night with no problem. (Banks run their checks at night, after collecting from the branches, to get the processing done before about 5 AM to get them into "The Fed" - or face stiff fines !! The design was from Potter Instruments, and the first Document Handlers sold/leased by G.E. were from Potter. These worked quite well. G.E. had procured them under an agreement that if Potter couldn't make enough handlers, or other problems, G.E. could manufacture the handlers itself. Indeed, soon G.E. was manufacturing the Potter design, with G.E. external sheet metal. We in the field suspected that the G.E. management had just screwed Potter. G.E. manufactured the handler controller (not shown) so that the customer could sort documents off-line. There was a G.E. design flaw that demonstrated that the designers had no clue about field conditions. The large ventilation/cooling fan was under the unit, sucking air and floor dust into the handler. If there was a problem, and documents (checks) started flying around the room - or an operator dropped a tray of documents, the cooling fan would suck the documents into itself, shred them, and blow the shreds into the machinery. Field people quickly reversed the fan rotation to stop that effect !! The succeeding generations of G.E. computers couldn't operate these machines well - and G.E., which had most of the U.S. banking business (more than even IBM) - abandoned the banking business - go figure -

The IBM 523 Card Punch was not known to fail.

from "the web" via Wilber Williams

I was trained on the General Electric 225 computer system. (Actually the G.E. instructors did a great job.) This included the logic to drive an IBM 523 punch. The 523 had a big cable and connector to plug into the 225. We asked about learning the 523 internals, and were told "Don't worry, they just work." And they did - On site, I wanted to see how tough they were. We punched "binary decks" of machine code loadable programs with about 50% holes - So I punch a few "laced" cards, all 960 hole positions punched. The machines groaned a bit - but just kept on working.

• Introduction - BUSINESS Machines
• The real world of business data processing
• "Recommendations"
• The Lockheed Denver fiasco

The real world of business data processing

I know that our managers didn't know the real world of business computing. The only exception was John Haanstra, hired from IBM, who died after a few months in a private plane crash. :-(( (G.E. proclaimed that a good manager could manage anything. You send someone to G.E. Management School in Crotonville, NY, and they are ready for anything.) One of our General Managers had headed up G.E. Chemicals. My boss (System Test and Diagnostics) had worked in G.E. Light Bulb accounting. a Dilbert cartoon ;-)) local copy I contend that some management positions require industry specific knowledge to help avoid listening to "the wrong people" and making silly/stupid decisions. I think few computer manufacturers outside of IBM expected high reliability. If a scientific computational run, or the usual student run, crashes - OK - lets re-run it - a couple of minutes - no big problem. In commercial data processing, payroll and other events *had* to be on time or there were expensive, costly, embarrassing consequences. If payroll crashes after say 1/2 hour,     - you have printed up maybe 1000 serial numbered checks     - on a restart, unless you have planned ahead, you print maybe 1000 redundant checks     - you might miss the pay day for your employees -     - - Some states, i.e. New York, finally said that you pay overtime until the employees are paid     - your operations people will likely screw-up and miss pay or double pay a few people The business consequences to *business* data processing tend to be ignored by new engineers and managers right out of college or working into the scientific market.

"Recommendations"

HQ engineers/managers should occasionally visit the real world of customers !! It is relatively easy to: make some lash-up that works OK in the lab for a while, manufacture it, and ship it. Then after a few months the complaints roll in !! and the customers start leaving. It seemed to me that IBM engineers were (usually) creating products for the real world of users. OK - I'm bigoted - I think managers and engineers ought to have "real world" experience.

The Lockheed Denver fiasco

Lockheed Denver - as many others - "had had it with IBM" - so they started buying from GE as a more humble, economical computer vendor. :-)) They had purchased:     - a GE-225 with high speed card reader and tapes for media conversion     - ??? and finally a GE-625 system intended to replace their IBM-7090 type machine For what ever reason Lockheed Denver became REALLY irritated with GE     - I wish I knew the particulars - In any case, they became REALLY hostile and actively tried to make GE look bad.     Apparently one person full time power cycled the high speed reader     - trying to cause it to fail. Phoenix reacted, sending all kinds of experts to rectify the complaints. Returning experts said they were well along resolving the problems - but - Lockheed Denver threw out everything with a GE Computer Department logo -     even equipment they had not complained about - The word gets out - the world is very small -

Granted that G.E Computer Department was chronically short of money - so is everyone, even the U.S. congress (which spends to buy votes).
Somehow, IBM seemed to get reliability right (with a few exceptions, like DataCell ;-))

   

The above "Why" section thanks to pressure from Karsten Lemm, a reporter for "stern", a German news magazine, who was not satisfied with my answer to "why GE shipped krappy peripherals".

• The disk heads that flew - off
• The power supply bolts that smoked
• The core memories that *sometimes* forgot
• Make one prototype (G.E. 625) and time share it for hardware and software development

The GE Computer Department was basically a bootleg operation - GE Headquarters had issued an edict that GE would *not* get into the general purpose computer business, which was exactly what GE Computer Department leadership was trying to do !!

The results were that GE Computer Department did *NOT* have the deep pockets of the GE Corporation - although many employees assumed and acted as though the pockets were very deep indeed. (Another story for much later.)

In any case, GE Computer Department was always strapped for cash, and tried to make up for it by emphasizing "Cost Improvements". OK, how can such a good idea go wrong? Well, make the proposed "improvements" without checking with designers or knowledgeable people !!

False (very expensive) cost improvements were the rule, not exception. The slightest quick check with designers could have prevented many/most of the disasters. Unfortunately the "cost improvement" program was badly administered. Groups were rated by the number and estimated dollar saving of "cost improvements" they made. If the group checked with a designer or competent person, the "cost improvement" might be shot down before being counted - so there was a negative reward for checking. :-((

Where to start in this sad list?

• The disk heads that flew - off

  The big GE "hard drive" (# 4 above) had a brief, special trouble. New production units would work "reasonably" well for a while - "reasonably" for that era in history - then individual flying heads would break loose and reek horrible havoc - crash other heads, score disk media, ... Investigation revealed that the beryllium-copper flexible head supports were breaking - but that the beryllium had been cost improved out. The resulting copper shim stock fatigued and broke in a few months. (As any mechanically inclined person would have predicted.) The resulting retrofit costs and loss of customer confidence were severe.

• The power supply bolts that smoked

  Power supplies (like 50 pounds each in these good old daze) had bolts to conduct the output power. You connected the power wiring (like +6 volts) and ground to these 1/4 inch diameter bolts. Suddenly, the power supply bolts of new production power supplies were getting very hot. The phenolic back panels that the current conducting bolts went through discolored and weakened and caused bad smells. Investigation revealed that the copper bolts that had been used to conduct the 20 or so amps of + 6 volts had been cost improved by substituting iron bolts from a hardware store instead. The iron, having much higher electrical resistance than copper, got hot and caused the problems. It was impractical to field disassemble the power supplies to replace those iron bolts and discolored phenolic back panels. New power supplies were shipped to the GE sites, and the local field engineers had more work to do - like life wasn't full enough already. Those Maytag TV ads of Maytag repair people with nothing to do were not GE field engineers!!

• The core memories that *sometimes* forgot

  Intermittent problems are the bane of any computer fixer's life. You suspect that a part is failing - but when you test it - it works just fine - until the customer uses it for a few days again. The DataNet-30 (a communications computer) was an 18 bit word machine, (18 expensive core planes) with out parity which would have needed another core plane and supporting circuits. However, GE core memories had been very reliable (the ERMA for the banking industry, and the 225 that I had helped maintain in the field) - so the parity checking was eliminated in this product. Except - new production DataNet-30s were having *A LOT* of trouble in the field. The hardware folks thought it was the flaky software folks and their flaky software - and customers were allowed/encouraged to program the real-time communication machines in assembly language. The software folks figured the complicated hardware was flaky. GE programmers and field engineers were flying all over trying to correct the problems and pacify irate customers that refused to pay for "their" DataNet-30s that were not doing the job. After a few months it was noted that memory diagnostics could run for days, then suddenly fail, then run just fine again. What could be causing this? The internal GE "Core House" had cost improved the soldering of the wires between core planes by not twisting the wires before soldering - the wires were just pinched together then soldered. In the field, these soldered joins could fatigue and crack just slightly. Conducting adequately sometimes, and not sometimes. Parity checking would have instantly identified the extended problem as a memory failure - and any soldering expert would have vetoed a pinched/not twisted solder connection. And the bean counters did not assign a cost to this whole fiasco either. - who could? - A very risky change ("anyone familiar with solder joints would veto the change) saved maybe a person-week and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in transportation cash, payroll cash, programming and engineering distractions, replaced memories, lost revenue, lost referrals, increased "cost of sales", lost reputation, lost "good will".

• Make one prototype (G.E. 625) and time share it for hardware and software development

  Save money not making a second prototype - and lose it on increased engineering labor costs and increased time to market. For better or worse, the basic design of the G.E. 625 series was imported from G.E. Schenectady (where it had been developed for a military contract?) As explained in Homer R. Oldfield's book Software had the prototype computer for 12 hours/day, and hardware had it the rest of the time. But when hardware got off the machine, it might or might not be working. Or it might be working except some instruction might not give correct status or something - anything. The result was that software was badly delayed, hardware and software fought (what else is new?), and hardware development badly delayed also. Who can say how much that decision to save a second prototype cost in blown engineering salaries and late time to market? The bean counters seem to think other people (engineers) are free when making decisions!! I love Dilbert!!

• Its getting late - more, many more, enough to bore, later - the list seemed endless but I forgot lots.

---

In summary - the GE Computer Department "Cost Improvement Program" had many high profile failures - due (I contend) to management ignorance, inattention and blunders. I cannot imagine that the successes out weighed the failures by a high ratio.

I imagine the bean counters counted the saved paper clips and re-used typewriter ribbons, and missed the more complicated, embarrassing costs - bean counters are paid to make management look good :-)) :-((

Long Live Dilbert!!
- How can Scott Adams get it (his cartoon strip) so right??

"Buy GE policy"

Early GE Time Sharing - a side view ;-))
Not yet checked by Don W Fry, Albuquerque, "Don Fry" < dwfry @ tritel . net > maybe the only other surviver of our group ??
also see Time Sharing History of Don Fry

There is a VERY interesting YouTube video on 'The Birth of BASIC - Dartmouth Time Sharing, which reminded me that I had a view of Dartmouth Time Sharing too ;-)) After two and a half years fixing GE-225 systems, I was brought into the "Diagnostic Test" section at headquarters at Phoenix. (OK, I was fairly well known in the NorthEast, and a class mate friend had a friend ;-)) One of my first tasks was to gather/create tests for the DataNet-30 which was having severe reliability problems at the time. I had never seen a DataNet-30 (DN-30) before that. This was an 18 bit machine with a special macro instruction to check/input/output all of the up to 127 serial serial channels much more quickly than could be checked in a programmed loop. The programmed loop could be taken literally, the program input device for a DN-30 was a punched paper tape reader ;-)) The punched Mylar based paper tape could be fed from one waste basket to another to avoid knotting and tearing. There was a hand held wind_up machine based on a motorized paper eraser used by draftsmen. Then I heard that recent production DN-30 computers were sick - but that the early Dartmouth Time Sharing DN-30 was rock solid. ? What is Time Sharing ? So "Time Sharing" - the story I heard was that Jerry (Ezekiel) Weiner (Manager of GE Computer Advanced Systems) had been involved. "Jerry" had been apparently unconventional - When the Dartmouth Time Sharing system was on the GE factory floor for integration and testing, the night shift floor techs were suspected of swapping suspect boards and parts from their own systems with circuit boards in the Dartmouth system. "Jerry" reacted by wrapping thick chains around "his" Dartmouth bound system. The plant manager was called in and chastised "Jerry" for this unseemingly behavior. Several more senior people I knew claimed to be on good terms with "Jerry" had a strange tale - apparently on a Sunday "Jerry" had been called into the the GE plant (on Deer Valley road - now a shopping center). He was met by the General Manager and a security person - and told to clear out his things - today - now. My friends said that management was worried that "Jerry" was so popular and well thought of that he should not be fired when folks were around. Later, when GE wanted to commercialize the Dartmouth System, George Fraine, a friend was given the task of adapting the software to commercial purposes - different log-ins, ... And apparently the Dartmouth system occasionally lost a user program - fix that too !! After an extended struggle George found that the fixed size file allocation program had a weird bug. If a user program was almost at the 3,000 character maximum, and just the right number of characters were to be appended, the update overwrote part of the NEXT header, destroying access to that other innocent file. The DN-30 had three characters/word, and someone at Dartmouth had mis-coded one particular situation. At one of the time sharing conferences announcing GE's entry into Time Sharing, which I wasn't invited to, I was on speaking acquaintance level with half of the presenters. What a ego boost ;-)) Later I went to work on IBM's TSS effort. My views on the often pooh-poohed BASIC One should remember that the machines of that era used very expensive (and "slow") core memory. The maximum directly addressable memory range for the GE-225 (and later GE-235) was 8 K 20 bit words. The memory cycle time for the GE-225 was 21 microseconds.      The language you specify had better be simple, or you will be compiling or interpreting all day. The language was intended for beginners and amateurs. If you want to spend 6 months explaining "symbol scope", "multiple inheritance", "pre-processors", ".h files", "objects" with their creation/destruction/quirks, ... - be my guest - I don't have the mental memory to mess with C++.      - I think most people writing in C++ have to use it daily or lose it.      - Granted, I would rather not write a compiler in BASIC.      - But I don't write that many compilers ;-)) OK, you can make "spaghetti code" with "GoTo" statements - But "GoTo" is great for exception and error handling !!! BASIC has the recommended flow control, such as SUB, WHILE, ... Granted the original BASIC had statement numbers - and "RENUMber" - That limitation (great for a quick TTY editor) was soon eliminated. BASIC didn't offer "memory_leaks", "garbage_collection", "uninitialized pointers", and so many other programming hazards so dear to programmers using modern languages. (While I was at Landis&Gyr years later, doing process control for electric power companies and the TVA, we were shipping fancy terminals that had "a memory leak". We had to instruct the power company operators to "re-boot" each of these fancy terminals once a week or it would freeze/halt. The terminal vendor went out of business before it found the code that "leaked memory".)

from Jim Phillips - December 2005

Hello Ed ... On GE Comp Dept and Elliot Card Reader- My first field assignment as Product Sv Eng was to Woods Hole Institute, Woods Hole MA in Feb 1963. This was a pure FORTRAN scientific research (number crunching) shop. The installation had a 225 CP, Elliot Card Reader, Card Punch, Flt Pt, DSU 204 disc, DN 15, and mag tapes. I was the only GE person on site. I served as Sys Rep and Field Eng. $144 a week I think. The day I walked in, the GE Installation people were finishing up. The customer had not signed for machine. As I walked into the room there was 4 or 5 people standing in front of the CP. They were pointing and laughing and talking about - guess what?- the Elliot Card Reader. If you think about it, the visual impact of the 225 and assorted peripherals is good. Or it was in 1963. But, the Elliot sitting up front in plain view destroys the image. It also invites questions. Like- what is it? Does it work? How can it read cards? How does the card get from there to there. Your kidding. First impressions- one is all you get. The WHOI Computer mgr was a good guy. He knew more about computers and the computer industry than we (GE) did. He had worked in computers for Lockeed in Glendale for a number of years. I walked up to intro myself as he was saying- and I will NEVER forget it- he said pointing at the Elliot, "GE can't be player in this industry if they think this is a card reader". Not a bad start, huh. Well to make the story short, I was there a year and the ONLY problem I had was the Elliot. The humidity (building was 30 feet from the Atlantic ocean) was a big problem. The scientist (users) would carry their object deck around in their back pocket. The WHOI Comp mgr understood, to a point. He and I became good friends. Drinking buddies even. We had many discussions at the Lee Side bar in Woods Hole. We concluded that the Elliot was a symbol of GE in the computer industry. A symbol that GE did not understand the industry or was GE being GE. Whatever. Over a beer at the Leeside my friend told me the story of how GE beat out IBM for the 3 yr lease. My boy had a grant from the National Science Foundation for a three yr lease and change to run computer center for same 3 years. IBM was the favorite, of course. The current installation at WHOI was a Bendix LPG?. I forget the sys IBM was going with (1440?). Anyway IBM was at $14,000 a month for 3 yr lease. The sys GE recommended (see above) was $14,000 a month. However after getting 8000 finance people from Phoenix involved, we said we would let them have same sys for $8000 a month. GE salesmen could not sell/lease computer without 8000 people from Phx finance, contracts adm, etc being involved. The Phoenix GE PEOPLE loved to get on airplanes and fly to anywhere to help "close the deal". So, we called it an Education discount. IBM said if they matched that price they would lose money. Hope I don't sound jaded. As you now I stayed with GE/Honeywell for quite a while. I grew up, married and raised a family while working for GE. But, I never became a GE PERSON. Now George Snively (sp) is a GE PERSON. And will be forever. I think you know what I mean. ... Jim

from Ian R Upton - Feb 2006

Ed, Somehow I stumbled across your site and it's history of GE and the 200 line of computers. I commenced work on them in 1964 in Australia and certain aspects of the system are burnt into my memories for ever: The Elliot card reader, what a challenge to keep them going. The Ampex mag tapes. You buy some long hose and mount the vac cleaner fans under the floor to cut down the noise. I liked it when all the thyatrons fired and the tape was stretched or one lot fired on and then would not come off so you had 2400 feet of tape in the door. I got so involved with my tirade I forgot mag tape noise suppression. They were so loud that folks got fatigued. And ear plugs were probably not appropriate for the G.E. representative. I also did the long hose and vac cleaner trick under the floor. I thought I was the only one that did it. I guess the bank sites in the area were in larger rooms and already had rather noisy document handlers - so the mag tape audio noise was rather lost. Oddly, of all the many troubles with the tape drives, those 2D21 thyratrons did not give me any trouble. I regarded them a really sweet little tubes, remembered fondly. Maybe later production designs/runs introduced more noise on their grids?? Now if you want to get me going we could talk about the open air contacts associated with the tape buffering and drove those big electric torque motors that drove the tape reels. And the silly little contact damper mechanism with the adjustable air hole that seemed impossible to adjust correctly. The 1200 LPM printer and the rotten mechanism for keeping the ribbon aligned. Also the clutch mechanisms which slowly wore giving all sorts of problems. Other faults I forgot - the list gets so long that after a while you worry that no one will take you seriously. Indeed - the left side of the printer ribbons - about 14 inches wide and rather expensive - would be pounded more and get de-inked much faster on the left than the right hand side. The de-inking caused the ribbon to shrink and pull to the left. There were no ribbon tracking aids such as installed on the IBM 1403 printer. The shrunk side would pull to the left and eventually pull over the restraint, leaving the right side of the paper with no ribbon or visible printing. Talk about irritated customer if the operator didn't check the ribbon condition almost hourly. Imagine doing payroll with half of the dollar amount not printing - and missing that fact until after the checks were distributed !! To tell the customer to replace the half worn ribbon was difficult. He would talk about design flaw and how much better IBM was than G.E. The alternative was to take the ribbon out, re-spool it a half twist end to end to get the direction right on the spools, and re-insert it with the half worn ribbon on the right - No fun and I refused to do it. Life is just too short to get all that ink on your hands. What a gross mess. Oh - Indeed, that printer paper advance magnetic clutch - we had basically two steel plates rotating against each other - and when you want to advance the paper you energize an electromagnet which locks the rotating plate with the non-rotating plate, which advances the paper. And of course the rubbing steel starts to squeal and squeak, like some automobile disk brakes. If you lubricate the assembly, the paper does not move or may just drifts up slowly. And the friction and the squealing causes circular ridges of wear - and then strange things can start to give the above mentioned strange problems. Fortunately I was dealing with new equipment - leaving the field before the printers got really daffy. We had one system which suffered from "stress corrosion", something in the air from the air conditioning, the plating on the transistor legs and they way they were soldered. An engineer slammed the door on the printer controller one night and some transistors fell off (mainly the 11g11 board), Woops you just had to touch them and the leads broke so we replaced thousands of them over the entire system, Unlike you I stuck with GE, Honeywell, Honeywell-Bull, Bull, Wang and Getronics before they laid me off about 6 years ago. Worked in Australia, New Zealand, the USA (Phoenix mostly), France and Japan. Worked as a hardware and software person on the GE 225, 265, GE400, GE600/6000/DPS90, GE58, GE 140, 115. Do you have any old prints or other documents. A number of us are beginning to help Al Kossow expand his already ENORMOUS web site. We can scan documents here and send them back - or we are thinking of having remote Kinko outlets scan the documents to .tif files to CDROM. I lurk about the very large Computer History Museum, and we have *NO* GE or BULL machines :-( And there appear to be none anywhere to try to get. I go to GE Reunions, and ask and nothing ... Were they all ground up to get the gold from the contacts?? Other totally missing vendors include RCA. Still working in the business but it is not quite the same as the heroic early days of computing, Regards Ian Upton. PS: Somewhere you mention getting $145 per week, around the same time I was getting $60-70 (Australian) per week.

I am associated with a restoration of an old IBM 1401 computing system - http://ibm-1401.info/index.html
and we got one of our IBM 729 tape drives working (mostly), at least enough to load/forward/rewind tape. There were comments about the unfortunate noise the drive made when it loaded tape into the buffer columns.

> Glad you like the noises! ;-) > > Robin thought the tape drive sound (the vacuum "fart" when the > tape loads) > sounded like an ER surgical procedure! ;-) > Indeed, the IBM 729 tape drive column suck in noise is a bit gross!! But at least it doesn't ruin your hearing. I serviced G.E. computing equipment which was competing with IBM. Our early tape drives were made by Ampex. They were different from the IBM tape drives - avoid IBM patents?? For buffering the very quick tape starts and stops, they used two methods: a swinging tension arm with fingers threading the tape - (silent but a little too much inertia) assisted by "pucker pockets" which could buffer about 5 inches of tape This is a related Ampex tape drive. Likely a FR200 series - . This was used on the G.E. ERMA system, and has a tape width of 3/4 inch instead of the later very popular 1/2 inch width. "Pucker pockets" were added to later versions of 1/2 drives that we used to reduce the effects of fingers bouncing, moving the tape in unexpected manner - and causing "crap in the gap" - unexpected magnetic flux changes in the inter-record gaps. - The write heads were turned off after the tape was expected to have stopped. If the tape moved unexpectedly between records, before the write heads were turned on again, previously recorded fragments could be in the inter-record gaps. Not good - actually very bad! Hmmm - yes - Phoenix sent me 4 new drives with the new pucker pockets and vacuum motors. Then had to send new pucker pocket swinging doors because the cold air of the north cracked the aluminum/glass interface and the glass because of differential expansion. - I could go on with tales like this all night :-(( Talk about weeping in your beer!! The pucker pockets pulled in the tape, and had a slot on the side to provide variable tension (so the tape did not go to the bottom of the pucker) A vacuum from vacuum cleaner motors pulled on the tape into the pucker pockets via the side slot. The air being sucked into the slot made a loud whistling/shrieking noise. And you know how loud a vacuum cleaner motor is when it is housed in the vacuum cleaner. Well, these vacuum cleaner motors were in the open bolted onto the frame of the drive. The vibration of the motor shook the frame similar to the strings of a guitar shaking the sound box, making the vibrations louder (coupling them to the air better). And the typical G.E. Computer installation consisted of 4 to 6 of these howling whistling shrieking drives. You could hardly hold a conversation near by!! Many maintenance people unbolted the motors from the frame and using longer hoses they purchased, placed the cursed things under the raised floor. If there was no raised floor, you could hang the motors from strings which helped some. The slot shriek was unpreventable - you just had to live with it. :-(( I soon got into software and a better life !! - that IBM tape drive farting suck-in sound is a small price to pay. Cheers --Ed Thelen

Canadian Banks - July 2007
From Stan Heinz - also see Pictures and more comments

Stan had said that his company, a bank, had re-ordered G.E. Computer Department equipment - upgrading from a GE-225 to GE-415. This was the second re-order I had ever heard of - and asked for more details :-)) I was with the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce in Canada. We ran IBM and GE (later Honeywell ) equipment across Canada. Montreal and Vancouver were using GE equipment. We had GE 225 with a 900 LPM printer, 6 200 Bit per inch-75 inch per second tape drives. This was back in 1963-1965. Regarding the cheque sorters we only had with the GE 225. Later when we went to the GE 415 we still had 2 sorters but different models and then added a third. The tape drives and printers were faster as well the printers being 1100 LPM models. Over the years we upgraded further, ending up with 3 GE 435's running DPS (Disk Programming System) and 3 sorters. By then we were running in-house On-Line Banking Systems with 2 GE Datanet 30 (GE 225) communications processors for the GE 435's and Olivetti Banking Terminals. For a short period We also had a Bull (GE 115). We ended our usage of GE equipment in 1976 when we started to convert our systems to IBM 370. I started in the Bank in branches for 1 year and then transferred to the Data Centre in Vancouver in 1964. I ended my tenure as Manager Computer Facilities when I resigned in June 1987. By the way, I don't think we ever tried to run more than two cheque sorters on-line at any one time and you are correct, the sorters ran off line much of the time to do general cheque sorting prior to shipping them back to the various bank branches. As I recall, the 435's were fast for their time at about 40,000 operations a second. I seem to recall a memory cycle time of under 4 micro-seconds on a 24 bit word with 4 BCD 6 bit bytes per word. ... Later and regards.................Stan I've had a quick look and am amazed at the info provided. You brought back some vivid memories when I read some of your stuff on the GE 225. Our GE 225 system actually was an 8 k word memory system (24 K Bytes) I really remember the terrible desk mounted card reader and how it used to chew up our program cards decks, we always had two spare decks for each program and a ton of backup bootstrap loaders (I believe it was 3 cards). I thought the printer was ok for the time but remember taping the start of one box of preprinted forms to the end of the other. I still have one segment of the GE print drum made into a desk paper weight. yeh, the Ampex tape drives were useless, our longest batch job was about 4 hours long and it was always agony waiting to see if the job would complete without an error. One of the things I remember is that some times if we got a tape parity error, we would display the record on the console lights and then toggle in a command to reposition the tape and then write a valid record. Then we would write a note to the bank branch to check the specific account, validate and correct the information manually. This sometimes could prevent a complete rerun of the batch job. Those were fun days!! By the way I seem to remember that an IBM 1401 could only do about 2000 operations (instructions?) per sec. I believe I have this info somewhere. Stan

Mike Robinson Australia - Feb 2010

Hi Ed, I worked on the second GE-225 installed in Australia in the early 1960s. The first was the installation at Queensland University, Brisbane, which you have referenced in your entertaining article about the quirky peripherals attached to the early 225s. The second installation was at Carlton and United Breweries in Melbourne, and I was a programmer at that site. Ian Upton, who commented on the Elliott card reader, was a maintenance engineer at the site. I remember him well. The third installation was the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Authority, and the fourth site was the Bank of New South Wales in Sydney. I think that was the extent of 200-series sites. Subsequent GE machines in Australia were sourced from Machines Bull in France or Olivetti in Italy. A GE-600 was sold to the Australian Department of Defence in about 1968, but the sale was later abandoned on instructions from headquarters in Phoenix Arizona, much to IBM's delight. I was stationed in Phoenix in mid-1967 doing benchmarks on the 600 series for the Australian government, and vividly remember how easy it was to change a machine from a 615 configuration to a 635 configuration. The operator pulled a wire out of one socket and inserted it into another socket, and presto! the machine took off like a rocket. I recall seeing an experimental cathode ray tube connected to a machine on the factory floor in Phoenix. It was a precursor to today's monitors, but back then there was no software to drive this type of peripheral. I also recall the many evenings when we abandoned scheduled production runs because of the lightning storms that raged around Phoenix in the summer months. Australian General Electric had service bureaux in Melbourne and Sydney, from which the company serviced many important customers, including banks and government agencies. Both centres had document readers for processing checks. Ironically, all the banks that used the service bureaux bought IBM machines, and the Bank of New South Wales followed suit after the Honeywell merger. Regards, MJR

Paul Boisvert Somersworth N.H. - Feb 2010

Tremendously enjoyed your GE225 stories. I started programming these guys in GAP and sometimes in "octal" via the front panel in a pinch. I still have lotsa parts (including a complete front panel) in my barn. I love talking to younger people about what it was really like to work with computers in 1970. I worked for GE in Somersworth N.H. until 2001. We used our GE225s and GE235s until the late 1980's. Paul Boisvert

Chuck Urmson - The French - March 2013

> Honeywell still exists but I believe all its computing business was taken over by Bull in France. Oh God - dealing with the French - French "GE Bull" was contracted by GE Phoenix to develop something - The money was being sent to France, but no evidence of progress was coming back. A minor official I knew was tasked with finding the French engineer in charge of the project and finding out what was going on - After confirming an appointment in Paris, our minor official took the plane for Paris - unfortunately, when he arrived, he found his contact had been called to some other city - Acquaintance calls back to HQ, what to to?? Follow the French engineer - Acquaintance follows contact from this town to that, always a day behind - - or maybe contact was in Paris the whole time, having a good laugh - After about 2 weeks, HQ gave up and called my acquaintance home. The French had won ( in their own way ) again.

Ian Fieggen - Australia National Bank - June 11, 2022

G'day from Melbourne, Australia. Following a quick Google search for "GE-225 Software", I enjoyed quite some some time browsing the fascinating G.E. computer history page on your website. I'm particularly loving all of your personal anecdotes. As an early 1980s-era computer specialist, I can really relate to your remarkable stories of diagnosing and fixing troublesome hardware or software issues. The reason for my search stems from my father's role as one of a team of nine who set up the first computer for the ANZ Bank (one of only four banks in Australia) in the early 1960s. As you can probably guess from my Google search, that computer was a GE-225. Dad passed away earlier this year. Among his belongings was a whole bunch of fascinating memorabilia from those heady days, including: The original memo sent out by ANZ bank in which they "seek applications from staff who may be interested in occupying the first few positions that have been created by this development." An original 120+ page computer printout, which Dad had crudely bound with cardboard and labelled: "S05 1st Assembly – The First ANZ Bank Program Ever To Be Assembled." Dozens of hand-drawn flowcharts for the above program and others. GE-225 Programming Reference Manual (CPB-252), revised October 1963. etc. Being an early assembly language programmer myself ({Hp} 64000, 8080, 80x86), that first assembly was of particular interest to me. I set myself the task of transcribing the code so that I could post it somewhere – probably to a new section of my own website. After failing my best efforts at OCR (blue-striped paper, faint print with partly missing letters, extensively overwritten with corrections and strikethroughs), my only real option was to hammer it all in by hand. But at 6,500-odd lines of code, I really needed to solicit whatever assistance I could via computer. So I started entering it into a spreadsheet, in the process gradually adding and fine-tuning formulas and lookup tables to "disassemble" the octal code into assembler source. By the time I was done, the disassembly was getting to 99%+ accuracy. Entering a single octal code would magically produce the operator, operand and "X". Having completed my exercise, I then wondered if there were any folks out there interested in this sort of thing – hence my search and subsequent arrival at your site. If you're interested personally, Ed, or if you know of any GE-225 groups – particularly here in Australia – I'd love to hear back from you. Kind regards, Ian Fieggen ;-) (aka "Professor Shoelace") https://fieggen.com/shoelace

Gabriel Raymond < declantwo @ live . ca > The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. Sept 3, 2023

Amazing I found that. (GE 225) My first job, at 19, was to operate a GE-225 for our local bank, The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. Work by night in the Data Center, that is where all cheques are sorted / listed.I had a 2 weeks training in the GE Toronto office then on the job in Montreal. We had the main computer, card reader, 8 tapes units, a printer, 15 to 18 in wide paper and a sorter for cheques. That one was about 36 some inches high by maybe 8 feet long, it had several, 10 or so slots to receive the cheques, facing the operator, ( not as shown on the pics) , each slot had a drum rotating that would suck up the cheque when it passes in front of it and deposit it in the appropriate slot. Sorting was first for the different banks, ( Royal, Montreal , National, Caisse Populaire, etc..) then a second sort , for our own branches ( across the province ) would take place , then finally a third for our local branches. A listing on large paper , rotating drum at high speed (characters / minute I don't remember but it was noisy and fast ) . that was my first job... in 1964, a long time ago.. I did not keep the books I was given about this equipment.. sadly ,.. I could reminisce better today..... Gabriel from Quebec..

G.E. Computer Time Line
grossly stolen from http://www.gecomputerdeptalumni.org/timeline.html June 2011

GE COMPUTER DEPARTMENT Event (Time) Line 1948 GE's Electronic's Laboratory, Syracuse, NY, builds OARAC vacuum tube computer for Wright Patterson Air Force Base. and a little extra - from ?Radio & Television News? October 1953 & BRL 1961 The OARAC (Office of Air Research Automatic Computer) was delivered to the Aeronautical Research Laboratory at Wright Air Development Center in February 1953. After physical installation it required about two weeks for electrical installation and checking. Consequently, good computing time began the latter part of April. 1952 Homer (Barney) Oldfield1 opens the Advanced Electronics Center (AEC) in Ithaca, NY, as General Manager; Walker Dix, Engineering Manager. PING putter designed by AEC engineer Karsten Solhein in his garage. 1953 Heavy Military Electronics Department (HMED), Syracuse, NY, awarded contract for development and production of the Radio Guidance & Tracking system for the Atlas ICBM, with Dr. Lewis Neelands as chief architect of the overall system. The"information processing. sub-system was named MISTRAM (Missile TRAjectory Measurement), with John Couleur as lead architect. 1954 Barney Oldfield founds the Microwave Laboratory at Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA. 1955 Spring George Metcalf's Report on the future of the Electronics Industry. Chapter on "Electronic Computers., authored by Clair Lasher, predicted that, believe it or not,"Electronic Computers. would become commercially feasible and the fastest growing segment of the Electronics Industry. 1955 Summer Claire Lasher, assisted by George Sively and others, under the auspices of the Technical Electronics Equipment Department prepared a business plan to go into the Computer Business. Claire asks Oldfield to check into the SRI ERMA project for him. The plan was returned from Ralph Cordiner with a big "No RJC." scribbled across it with an orange crayon. 1955 Fall Ralph Cordiner follows up his "no" with a letter stating: "UNDER NO CIRCIMSTANCES WILL THE GENERAL ELECTRIC COMPANY GO INTO THE BUSINESS MACHINE BUSINESS. HOWEVER, SOMETIME IN THE FUTURE, IN SUPPORT OF OUR HISTORIC BUSINESS IT MAY BE NECESSAY FOR US TO GO INTO THE PROCESS COMPUTER BUSINESS". 1955 October Bob (Dr.Robert R.) Johnson transfers from the Syracuse Electronics Lab to the Microwave Lab as its Engineering Manager. Bob and his associates play a major role in the ERMA proposal and in the early design and development of the ERMA machine. He later transferred to Phoenix as the Computer Deprtment's Engineering manager. 1955 Fall Dr. Baker approves B of A Letter of Intent for $30 million of ERMA (Electronic Recording Method of Accounting) systems as a "process computer" and authorizes $50,000 to write a proposal and negotiate contract. (Final contract not signed until shipment of the last ERMA system, by which time the contract value had increased to $50 million total.) 1956 February 3 ERMA proposal submitted to B of A, negotiations begin. Cordiner wanted no part of this business. In fact, it's believed that the only reason Cordiner let Baker's group make a bid was because Cordiner was assured by his staff that IBM would win the contract hands down. 1956 May ? Ken McCombs opens Computer Department payroll account for himself, Owen Lindley and George Snively. (Barney Oldfield on Microwave Laboratory and later transferred to the Technical Electronics Equipment Department's payroll. Not added to CD payroll until fall 1956.) 1956 June 28 Industrial Computer Section holds Computer Symposium at Electronics Park in Syracuse. Barney Oldfield shown as General Manager, Computer Department, reporting to Harold Strickland, Industrial Electronics Division. Geiser, Lasher, Barclay, McCombs & Newman shown as sub-section managers. Barney Oldfield interviews Dr. Herbert R. J. Grosch. 1956 July ? Office opened in Lee Lee Building, above Wittig's Ice Cream Parlor, on East Gennesse Street in Syracuse. Ray Barclay, Art Newman & Ken Geiser added to CD payroll. 1956 August ? Site selection team formed. 1956 September NCR Contract signed for development of the ERMA check reader. 1956 November 2 Herb Grosch calls a press conference in Tempe, Arizona and prematurely announces that he has selected Phoenix and the rest will follow. He announces a computer center to be established at Arizona Normal (later State) University with an IBM704 computer (which he diverted from the Jet Engine Department in Evendale, Ohio, and which had a military priority!) 1956 November 5 Site team selects Phoenix as the site. Barney Oldfield prepares a $5,000 Appropriations Request for a sales office in Phoenix to liaison with B of A. Will hand carry to Harld Strickland's office to try to get approval. 1956 November ? GE signs option on 1,000 acres accumulated from John Jacobs, (?) Eaton and one other, on Black Canyon Hwy at Thunderbird Road. 1956 November 17 Barney sends Manufacturing people (Stan Brown, Earl Kittle, Don Reed and wives) on the road to Phoenix with orders to call in each night to receive instructions as to whether or not to keep proceeding. 1956 November 20 Strickland signs $5,000 appropriation. Oldfield calls the Lee Lee building and the engineers in the General Engineering Lab in Schenectady and tells us to get on the road to Phoenix. He will be unavailable after he hangs up. 1956 November 26 Manufacturing people procure office space on the 5th floor of the new First National Bank of Arizona at 401 North Central Avenue, Phoenix, AZ. Sign on door read "GE Computer Department". 1956 Installation of the first Atlas Radio Guidance system begins at Cape Canaveral, Florida; Walker Dix, Site Manager. 1957 January ? Additional space acquired on the 2ndfloor of the KTAR building on North Central Avenue. ???? ERMA project moved into facility on Charleston Road in Moutainview, CA. 1957 Computer Department leases ASU's new Engineering building. 1957 ? Eaton builds 5,000-sq. ft. facility on Peoria Ave. to lease to Computer Department. 1957 October Product Scope meeting creates charter for a "Computer Department". 1958 Deer Valley plant built. 1959 February First ERMA shipped. Upon delivery, Ronald Regan hosted the press event. 1959 April Cordiner fires Oldfield following the ERMA dedication ceremony at the B of A. Claire Lasher appointed Acting General Manager with orders to complete the ERMA and NCR 304 contracts and to get out of the"Business Machine. business and concentrate on process computers. Next 18 months spent planning the"Big Look. in an attempt to get Cordiner's decision reversed. 1959 Decision to launch the GE-225, a 20-bit computer, designed by Arnold Spielberg and Chuck Prosper, based on the GE-312 and GE-412 process control computers. 1960 HMED receives Cordiner's okay to market a militarized/hardened version of the "MISTRAM" information processor. as the the M-236 ("M" as in military, "36" as in 36-bit) computer. 1960 Decision to launch the Mosiac line, a family of 24-bit computers, as the GE-400 series. 1961 Spring Claire Lasher gets OK to implement the"Big Look. from Cordiner. 1961 May Second First Annual National Sales meeting at Superstition Hotel in Apache Junction, AZ, kicks off the"Big Look. (The"First Annual. meeting was canceled when Claire didn't get an earlier meeting with Cordiner.) 1962 Start of the design of the GE-235, a faster version of the GE-225. 1962 CD commences design/development of the"Y-series. computer as the high performance upgrade of the GE-400 line. 1962 HMED commences development of the M-2360 as a high performance upgrade of the M-236. 1962 July First sales pitch by John Couleur for M-2360 versus the Mosiac"Y. machine. 1963 1Q An evaluation team, led by Dr. Don Shell, manager of the Mathematics Department, GE Research Lab, reviews the design and status of the Computer Department's"Y. machine and HMED's M-2360. The team recommends the latter as the next large scale computer to be offered by GE (as the GE-600 Series.) 1963 February Clair Lasher replaced by Harrison Van Aken as general manager of the Computer Department. 1963 CD's Advanced System Lab and Dartmouth College begin development of a time-sharing operating system, including the Basic language, running on GE-235 and Datanet-30 hardware. The system became operational in 1964, and the software became the Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS). 1963 Ralph Cordiner retires; Fred Borch selected as his successor. 1964 First shipment of the Datanet-30, a data communications mini-computer, designed by Bill Bridge5 based on the GE-312 process control computer. 1964 First shipment of the 24-bit GE-400 series. 1964 Discussions with MIT's Project MAC group, led by John Couleur, re modifications/additions to the GE-635 architecture to address Project MAC's time-share needs; start of development to implement such changes in a new product designated as the GE-645. 1964 March Lou Rader re-hired from Univac as VP, Industrial Electronics Division 1964 June Announcement of the GE-600 line, based on the Syracuse M-2360 hardware, with GECOS (General Electric Comprehensive Operation System) developed in Phoenix. 1964 November Formal take-over of Bull by GE. 1964 August Contract signed with MIT (for Project MAC) for a GE-645. The software, a new paged time-sharing system named MULTICS (MULTiplexed Information and Computing Service), to be developed jointly by GE's Cambridge Information Systems Laboratory (CISL, reporting to Phoenix), MIT and Bell Labs. 1965 April First shipment of the GE-635 prototype, with GECOS I software. 1965 Introduction of the packaged GE-265 system, consisting of the GE-235 and Datanet-30 hardware (235+30=265) and the DTSS/Basic software, achieving fame as the first fully integrated commercial "time-sharing system" and the backbone of GE's Time-Sharing business. 1965 Licenses negotiated with Toshiba and Nippon Electric Co. (NEC) for manufacture of the GE-600 line. 1965 November First release of GECOS II. 1966 January H. Van Aken replaced by Lou Wengert as general manager. 1967 January GE-645 delivered to Project MAC. 1967 GE-645 hardware group transferred to HMED, Syracuse, reporting to Walker Dix. 1967 First release of GECOS III, with an embedded time-sharing sub-system (TSS). 1967 Development started for the GE-655, a new design with integrated circuit modules, liquid cooling, 2x the speed of the GE-635, and start of construction of a new manufacturing facility at Deer Valley to produce the new IC modules. 1968 First release of the IDS (Integrated Data Store) data base software for the GE-600 line, one of the first database management systems; developed by Charles W. Bachman6. 1968 GE creates a new Computer Division, consisting of the Large Systems Department (LSD), the Medium Systems Department (MSD, The Small Systems Department (SSD) and the Special Information Systems Department (SIPD). The Computer Division grew into the GE Information Systems Group, with 25,000 employees and $1.5 billion in installations. 1968 Transfer of the HMED engineering sub-section responsible for the M-2106 development (largely intact, and tagged with "The Syracuse Mafia" moniker ), along with the recently transferred GE-645 group, to Phoenix as the nucleus of LSD's hardware engineering staff. Walker Dix appointed Engineering section manager. 1968 December Stanford Smith is replaced by Hillard Page as VP Information Systems Group; John Haanstra appointed Information Systems Equipment Division Manager. 1969 Jul-Oct Shangri-La seminar at Hollywood-by-the-Sea, Florida, to formulate a plan for a new GE Advanced Product Line 1969 August John Hanstra dies in his private aircraft crash; John Burlingame named in replacement. 1970 Oct GE's computer systems business, less the time-sharing business, is sold to Honeywell, Inc, and becomes part of Honeywell Information Systems (HIS), consisting of the facilities and personnel at Phoenix and Oklahoma City (GE) and at Bellerica and Foxboro (Honeywell), and presided over by Clarence (Clancy) Spangle as one of two major groups of Honeywell, Inc. Norman Feldman named VP of the Phoenix Computer Operations (PCO), reporting to Lee Sheenam, VP of the Computer Systems Division (CSD); WalkerDix named as PCO Director-Engineering. 1973 May Honeywell announces reorganization of CSD reorganization, with four operations reporting to Lee Sheehan: The Computer Systems Division Operations, headed by VP Norm Feldman, responsible for assisting Lee Sheenan at the divisional level in the general management of CSD; the Phoenix Computer Operations, headed by VP Norm Feldman (Acting), responsible for the Manufacturing, Quality Control, Finance and Employee Relations functions at Phoenix, Oklahoma City and San Diego; the Boston Computer Operations, headed by VP Lee Sheehan (acting), responsible for the same functions at Billerica and Foxboro; and the Engineering Operations, headed by VP Walker Dix, responsible for all Engineering functions across CSD. 1973 First shipment of the GE-655 as the Honeywell 6080. 1988 Honeywell Information Systems, Group Bull and NEC form a new entity named Honeywell Bull. 1991 Honeywell Information Systems sold to Groupe Bull. The new entity is named "Bull HN". Compiled by Walker Dix, 23 April 2009 Revised 23 May 2009 Footnotes: Computer Pioneer Award, 1997, for "Pioneering work in the development of banking applications through the implementation of ERMA, and the introduction of computer manufacturing to GE". GE Cordiner Award, 1963, for "Contributions as Program Manager for the Atlas/MISTRAM program in acquiring and executing the US Air Force MISTRAM contract, valued at $200+ million". GE Cordiner Award, 1963, for "Contributions as the leading architect in the conception and implementation of the MISTRAM information processing system". Computer Pioneer Award, 2006, for "Contributions to real time data acquisition and recording". Computer Pioneer Award, 2001, for "The marrying of computers and communications technology in the Datanet-30". ACM Turing Award, 1973, for "his outstanding contributions to database technology"; elected as a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society, 1977, for his pioneering work in database systems"; listed in the Database Hall of Fame. Can you contribute more to the "timeline"? If so, please send your information to the Website Moderator

A History of CPM and PERT programs

information about the algorithms and later software programs "CPM" and "PERT" from http://b-reactor.org/ B REACTOR MUSEUM ASSOCIATION "Lost In The Telling" "DuPont had developed a system of laying out the total scope of a complex program into discreet self-contained jobs for which could be identified the required input of information, materials, circumstances etc. and the resultant products of information, materials etc., to be used by subsequent jobs within the program^35. These were jobs for which reliable estimates of tulle duration and manpower requirements could be developed, with each of these jobs arranged into a web of activities such that each job was placed in the appropriate sequence of inputs and products and none was arranged r to occur before the r required inputs had been achieved from prior jobs. This web showed the required amount of tulle to go from stab to finish by each of the branches of the web. The route through the web that showed the longest time requirement was identified as the critical path of the project, i.e. the series of tasks that had to be completed in sequence that required the longest time. Thus, all other sequences of required tasks could be done in a shorter period of time. The critical path defined the minimum time required to complete the project, provided manpower was not an issue in the accomplishment of all the other tasks not on the critical path. A similar assessment of the manpower and type of crafts needed in each job, and the period during which all the tasks had to be performed, would indicate the staffing needed of each particular type to maintain the critical path, or possibly identify another set of tasks which could become the critical path. At frequent intervals this chart would be updated to reflect actual times required for accomplished tasks and new estimates for forthcoming tasks. It also identified those parts of the project which would most benefit the overall project from close control and efforts to improve the rate of progress. In a real sense, it was a "living plan". "DuPont had first developed this scheme, which was called the Critical Path Method (CPM) system, in 1940 a couple of years before being asked to take on the plutonium production job. It remained an unshared company treasure for more than 15 years before its disclosure in the late 1950s. At that time it was shared with the U.S. Navy where it was refined and called the PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) and claimed as a U.S. Navy development^36. "Several of the chroniclers of the Manhattan project have noted that work at Hanford was slow in getting under way. Perhaps what they overlooked was that DuPont did indeed start from ground zero; first picking the site, where essentially nothing existed from which to start any sort of industrial project, and building that location into a construction project employing between 39,500 and 45,000 workers (depending on the source one uses) and employing approximately 120,000 over the course of the total program."

Nelson Rose - GE 210 - March 2021

Hi again Ed. Sure glad you are still kickin. So nice to hear from someone that is familiar with the GE Computer Dept. My first job out of school was with Sperry Rand Univac in Ilion NY. I had just graduated from Wm & Mary Tech in Norfolk, VA so my interest was more in the Product Service than the programming side. I started Univac School in the fall of ’60 but after a few weeks SRU shut the school down and laid everyone off. RIP Univac. I got a job at the National Bank of Detroit programming their new GE-210 system. I got the 210 job at the bank because my resume said “electronic” and “Univac”. I guess they thought I was a computer expert. We brought them out of the IBM tab world and into the high-speed computer age. After we got NBD up and running I went to work for GE. (I knew Vic Casebolt, Sales Eng. in Detroit, so he helped get me over the politics of being hired away from a customer). Started PS school in June ‘63 and finished in Dec ‘63. I was given a yet to be installed 225 system at Clark Equip. Co. (made fork lifts) in Battle Creek, Mi. I installed the Clark sys and ran it for almost a year. Since I was the only one in the Detroit district that had installed a system, I became the area installation Eng. I got transferred to the Detroit office and began site prep/installs full time. Some of my installs were: Clark Equip. Co., Ford Motor HQ, Chrysler HQ, GM Tech Center, Univ. of Kansas, Wolverine Shoe Co. (Hushpuppies), Mich. Secretary of State, First Federal S&L Detroit, and about 5 GE depts. I also helped service a DataNet 30 at Owens Corning Glass in Toledo Ohio from time-to-time. The Central Region (Chicago office) sales were doing well and they needed installation help so I started doing their installs also. They had an installer (name was Bovee) but he couldn’t handle the load. The PS manager in Chicago was Hutchenson. I even installed a GE-600 at the GE Evondale plant (jet engines). I did that until ’66 when the Honeywell rumors started circulating. I didn’t want anything to do with Minneapolis so I started looking for a place in GE to transfer to. The GE TV dept. was hiring so I went with them. Retired with 25 years at GE.

Return to short bio
Updated January 2023

• The Rise and Fall of the General Electric Corporation Computer Department, by J.A.N. Lee
• General Electric Enters the Computer Business - Revisited, by H. R. (Barney) Oldfield
• The Core of the Black Canyon Computer Corporation, by John Couleur

• Time Sharing History of Don Fry