I met Gene Amdahl once at a USC alumni function of some sort. It was right after I joined Apple during the interval between the introduction of the Apple III and the Lisa/Mac. He was very interested in Apple's view of personal computing, and as a new employee I had already drunk the Apple Kool-Aid and was happy to oblige with visions of Apple boxes everywhere.

My earliest exposure to computers was in High School. I went to an unusual school that split the day into two, with the afternoon in a regular 3R's classroom setting but with the mornings in a technical shop, or discipline. I was in the Electronics Shop, and we became very competent in electrical engineering by the time we graduated.

In my junior year, our school was given a Burroughs 205 computer, no doubt as a tax writeoff from Burroughs Corporation. This was one of the last of the vacuum-tube mainframes, and it was a marvel to behold. It took up an entire classroom, which had to be completely rebuilt with a false floor and a massive air conditioning system. The computer had maybe 2,000 vacuum tubes and in the morning Father Steichen (it was a parochial school) would come in and throw the big power switch. The computer would power-up in stages: first the drum memory would begin to spin, then the filament voltage would come on-line, then the grid voltages, then finally the B+ high voltage. The whole sequence took maybe 60 seconds, and was accompanied by cool sounds of increasing rpms and the hum of some seriously-sized power transformer windings. To a 17-year-old this was as addictive as heroin.

Once powered up, the computer would invariably fail the test routines. After all, with several thousand vacuum tubes, the MTBF was probably something like 10 hours. He would sigh and go over and open the front doors on the grey six-foot-tall metal cabinets. Staring back at him would be hundreds of little vacuum tubes, their filaments glowing a dull red. You could feel the heat from 6 feet away. Sometimes he could fix the fault by giving a cabinet a sharp whack with his hand. Other times he would have to power down and pull out a flipflop assembly. This was a small metal box with a big handle. The box was roughly the size of an external firewire drive, and there were 8 vacuum tubes on the front, by the handle. These 8 tubes comprised 4 flipflops. He would put in a spare and power the thing back up.

There was no such thing as solid-state or even core memory back in those days. Nonvolatile memory for the B205 was a spinning drum, which held 4,000 words with each word comprised of 40 bits. There was a reserved part of the drum which held "fast memory" which was something like 50 words but repeated 10 times around the circumference, so they could be recalled very quickly.

You programmed the computer with paper tape or by flipping the register switches on the operator's console. I had found a simple formula that calculated how high a rocket could go given a certain thrust, weight, and burn time. For the Open House that year I manually entered the formula using the switches (took about an hour) and then when visitors stopped by the operator could manually put in the variables on the console, hit "run", and watch the amazing light display. Three seconds later, the answer would be displayed on the register light bank in binary-coded-decimal.

Because of the enormous cost in electricity (both heating the filaments and then cooling the room) the B205 lived with us only for about 4 years, to be replaced by an IBM 1401 (about the size of a very large square home refrigerator). There are still a few around; the easiest way to see one is to watch an old cheezy Batman TV episode. It was the "Bat Computer" in the cave.

I'll always remember that B205 at my high school, especially how it looked with the cabinet doors open and the lights turned off...