Unanswered Questions

In the movie "Hidden Figures", NASA receives an IBM 7090 in 1961. What is the subsequent timeline of the primary computing means for flight planning and orbit calculation? Specifically, what was the ...

Recently I learned that there was an operating system for the BESM-6 mainframe developed in DDR: a bibliographical list includes and quite a few more German-language publications (up to item 105), ...

Due to lack of the OS-level file system on the BESM-6, and to deficiencies of data visualization tools which could help people decide which blocks of a system disk could be reused (the line of ...

I'm currently using an IBM Model M keyboard with a PS/2-to-USB active adapter. When I type fast on my main PC, almost any key will get "stuck" and keeps repeating until I press another key. ...

After solving a configuration challenge, the ISA Token Ring adapter in my RS/6000 is still not connected to the ring. Extract from errpt -a: LABEL: NONE IDENTIFIER: 0118D2D0 Date/Time: ...

This page references a problem with the IBM 5162 BIOS where it will present an error during POST under some circumstances and that using a third-party BIOS was a workaround. What other BIOS ROMs ...

A while ago I read a post about creating the smallest possible ELF executable doing something observable — printing the number 42, for example — which Linux could accept and execute successfuly. The ...

In a talk on the IBM 360 and the computers it replaced the speaker at 39:35 describes the 7070 as 'a dog', and elsewhere contrasts it unfavorably with the 1401 (which considerably exceeded ...

A description of the hardware-level track format of the IBM media used on the BESM-6 I've found is as follows (translated by Google with minimal corrections): Track header structure: ...

I've found a text formatting tool, under the name of SCHEMA, which would accept an input language like *RED *0STA*NN*RG*1RL*0MCS1 20 *3/ *MDLorem ipsum dolor sit amet, *MDconsectetur adipiscing elit, *...

Background: IBM compatible tape structure (*1) consists of a series of label blocks describing the volume and each file (Data Set). Essential the structure looks like this: VOL1..9 Volume header ...

A common technology stack for line of business applications in the sixties and seventies was IBM COBOL with the IMS database. I'm curious about how the combination handled record definitions. COBOL ...