[inforoots] 1130 designation

[Dan Hopping]

I was the Midwestern region person who went off East to be trained on 
the 1130 and come back and 'Teach the Teachers' in the Midwest Region.  
At that class we were told that the number designation came from 
multiplying 360 by Pi and dropping the decimal places.  Remember that 
the 360 was a very big deal then and the 360 represented the 360 degrees 
in a compass rose.  The compass rose was the symbol of the 360. 

With the announcement of the 360 there was manual for machine 
designations for the 360 family that was different than the 7000 series 
machines.  The 3 designated the third generation, the second digit was 
the type of machine and the last two were the machine within the type.  
This designation even included the 3650 Point of Sale system that was 
announced in 1973 and all of it's follow on products until the end of 
the 70s.  I was involved with the retail products in the 70s and had a 
copy of that naming policy manual since we had to strictly adhere to it.

The 1130 was meant to be a scientific machine for a department or 
scientist and it was not the same internal coding that was in the 360 so 
it did not have the 360 naming designation.  Because it was a scientific 
machine, I was told, it was Pi times 360 without the decimal points.  I 
believe that was even in the introduction manual in the original 
announcement material.

To me that machine was the PC of it's day.  I was lucky enough to sell 
and install a number of them in the Midwest.  I do not, however have 
found memories of writing assembler code where I/O was performed 
character by character with a conversion routine.  I remember a long 
night helping a near hostile customer write code in assembler. 

There were an awful lot of neat programs written for the 1130 and shared 
through  the University network.  Especially the UCLA Math routines.  I 
had a customer who took rainfall measurements from the Ohio river basin 
and put them into a contour mapping program that would estimate the Ohio 
river flood levels hour by hour.

Now, my Palm Pilot is more powerful and has more software.

It was a really neat machine though.