Getting it working, though. Huge job. It's taken years to get the IBM 1401 machines at the Computer Museum in Mountain View running, and they have help from some of the designers and maintenance people.
We would iterate from the keypunch room, to the 360/20's card reader, and wait for the mainframe to process our code and transmit the code output to the local printer, for review at tables large enough to page through fan-fold paper, to check and mark-up the code. Back then, we didn't need watches to remind us to stand up and walk around every 30 minutes -- the coding workflow forced us to!
Reading the Principles of Operations for the 360/20, the processor was supported half-word (16 bit), and had no floating point, but support packed decimal numbers. Our machine had 16K.
It was great to see the article -- made me reminisce about the days of me carrying boxes of punch cards and inches of output back and forth to my residence.
We had to physically write out code on paper.
I was really pissed about this at the time and felt it was antiquated.
His argument was at least we didn't have to deal with punch cards.
When he was a kid he would MAIL in his punch cards that he built at home and would have to pay for their execution so he would often have to wait 2-3 weeks for the results to come back.
Frankly while the machine itself is interesting, what I'm really interested in is what they find on those tapes and disk packs!
I wonder if they have a Twitter feed or mailing list to keep updated on their progress. This is a really cool "barn find".
The card reader/punch are part of the charm of something like this, though -- that immediate physicality is a real "oh, wow, so THIS is how it works" kind of moment that you can sort of follow up to records, floppy disks, and CDs.
Plus, I imagine if people could make their own little programs through a more modern interface that made the cards, those would make cool souvenirs that might help finance the museum a bit.