Unanswered Questions

My dad was a computing professional in Scotland in the 1970s. He received a couple of industry trade magazines every week, such as Computer Weekly and Computing. In one of them, I remember there being ...

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. ...

The IBM 650, one of the first general-purpose digital computers, designed in the early fifties, used decimal digits with bi-quinary representation for reasons discussed here: Why did the IBM 650 use ...

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 wrote this arbitrary precision arithmetic utility on BSD in my postgraduate days, then after graduating ported it to DOS using TurboC. Was proud that it would do the same thing with 16bit word ...

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 ...

By use, I mean are they still actively being developed for. I know this is the case in New Zealand and USA. In particular, is ALGOL code still being written on them?