What are some of the old systems people remember using? The first machine I ever got my hands on was a Univac 1004, at the end of 1965. After studying some manuals I found at my uncle's place, he took me in to his office one day (I was 15 at the time) and I got to play around with it. I could close my (by then crossed) eyes and see the brightly coloured wires dancing. This beast was an all-in-one unit consisting of a 400-card-per-minute reader (hey, does anybody remember 90-column cards?), a 400-lpm drum printer which could probably survive a nuclear attack, and a whopping 961 (31*31) 6-bit bytes of core. An 200-cpm card punch (built like a tank) stood nearby. The plugboard had, I seem to recall, 5120 hubs which you could wire together to your heart's content, although many of them were "collectors" (diode-ORs) and "distributors" (diode-protected fan-outs). Univac later upgraded the 1004 to a 1005 by providing a super plugboard with lots of transistors that you put in and left there; it made the machine act like a genuine *stored-program computer* complete with a weird little card-based assembler. They made it possible to access the 32nd row and column of that little core box (in a manner suitable only for storing one-byte values, but what the heck, it was now a real K) and added some more so you could have two or even 4K. Oh well I wasn't going to MENTION the cruddy 026 (an IBM card punch). The shop I was reminiscing about in the referenced article didn't hap