[inforoots] Origin of the IBM 1130 Name

[Van Snyder]

On Mon, 2006-10-30 at 07:34 -0800, Bill Worthington wrote:

> I'm not sure what the logic was in selecting machine numbers back in
> the 1960s.  There did see to be some order to it however.  I believe
> that they were all assigned by the product marketing folks in White
> Plains.  Development had their own names for unannounced machines like
> NS, FS, Shark, etc.  (This was good because some of them never saw the
> light of day.)

I understand 1620 was called CADET, not because it was a beginner
machine, but because it meant "Can't Add, Doesn't Even Try" (the
arithmetic was done with lookup tables, with a little bit of hardware
help for multiply/divide).  We had telemetry-processing applications on
1620's that changed the adder table to think in octal.

I understand the 1400 series number came from the original 1400-
character memory size.

Of course, I could be wrong on both scores.

-- 
Van Snyder                    |  What fraction of Americans believe 
Van.Snyder at jpl.nasa.gov       |  Wrestling is real and NASA is fake?
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