system, allowing the execution of programs in sequence in what is called a batch operation. Individual programs were entered on a card-deck that had pre- and post- control cards placed before and after the deck. A number of such decks were stacked into the card reader hopper and the operating system would read a start job card and process the following deck according to control parameters in the prefacing control card. The post-deck control card gave instructions on the conduct of the program after its deck was read. The operating system could make use of magnetic tape for intermediate storage, so it was not actually a requirement to punch out card decks. One could start from assembly language, compose machine language that was then written to magnetic tape and then execute the machine language image from magnetic tape. Programs could make use of magnetic tape for intermediate data storage. An IBM 1410 could invert a 400 by 400 matrix by tossing off intermediate stages of the inversion operation to intermediate magnetic tape storage, rewinding the tape and performing another pass of the algorithm. The task could often take several hours to run to completion, but it was a quantum leap in computational ability compared to any other approach of large-scale statistical analysis.

Again, from IBM the scientific computer family was represented by the IBM 70xx series of systems. These were 32-bit word length binary machines, and a machine with 32,768 words of memory was pretty much state of the art in the mid-1960’s. This series of machines saw the significant evolutionary progression of the addition of rotating disk drives for large-scale intermediate storage. Such drives were much faster than magnetic tape and offered random access of information rather than the purely sequential access offered by magnetic tape. As we suggested back in Chapter 2, one could hazard a guess that most of the electronic computational effort within NASA to send men to the moon made use of IBM 70xx class machines, with perhaps a few IBM 360 class machines also in the mix. One can further hazard a guess that one fully configured laptop computer circa 2007 could surpass all of the computation facilities available to NASA worldwide for the Apollo missions through 1969. Well actually, since it takes about six hundred 2400 foot reels of 800 bytes-per-inch, 9-track magnetic tape to store one gigabyte, the NASA warehouses full of telemetry data might require a few extra boxes besides the laptop. Figure that today we can get a terabyte of disk capacity in a container the size of a small book and we see that the required configuration is still not too big.

So, why do we recount these rather trivial details about the days of primitive computers? Well, it may just be that the authors are old guys that don’t get out enough. However, perhaps more to the point, many of these same operational procedures are used on that fully configured laptop computer circa 2007; they are just done a whole lot faster and can make use of a lot more resources. Perhaps it brings some focus to the comparison of the brains of Sahelanthropus tchadensis, considered to be the earliest hominid species versus that of Homo sapiens; a comparison of cranial cavities of approximately 350 cc versus 1500 cc.

As the computer world grew past the primitive baby steps stage, progressively more cognitively enabled systems came to the fore. The IBM 360 was a mutational advance in computer systems, from a standpoint of hardware as well as software. We touched on the evolving hardware features back in Chapter 4. Of more interest to us now is the form of operating system software that showed up on the IBM 360. The OS/360 was among the earliest large commercial-grade operating systems; it subsequently evolved to support multiple simultaneous users, multi-tasking and multiple processors. Moreover, it gave rise to a succession of operating systems that emerged much as new species in and of themselves. IBM tended to follow a policy of incorporating emulators for old computers in the new versions of computers that it brought out. This was something of a technical rendition of the idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Through this mechanism, programs that were developed and run under the OS/360 operating system can still

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