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That is an excellent read!  I hope he did the follow up with Don Eckdahl, and that someone can find it.  One comment about Carl Rench's recollection, the man in the 80's that he mentioned as Tom Jang was in fact Tom Tang.  I worked in his organization for a lot of years.

Excellent, Herb! Thanks a lot.

Attached please find a 1984 interview with Carl Rench, an early computer pioneer with NCR.

CRAMs on the 615?
Yes, they had. I had to visit the Stadtverwaltung Witten, were they had two 653 CRAMs connected to a 615-200. Obviously they were less afraid of double-drops, than headcrashes on the 655. The 653-CRAM was not that bad, also the 353. One had to do good maintenance, as Klaus Greiner did at the Computer-Center in Hamburg. Each morning he had a complete loader assy on his desk, and you where not alowed, to disturb him, until he laid it aside. The biggest missuse of the CRAM was to run sort-programs on it, that killed each loader and head.

Best regards
Reinhold

My name is Terry Mozley and I was a 315 and 615 Instructor at Borehamwood and Brent. I then managed the transfer of the training facility to Dundee and continued to manage the training operation in Dundee for a while before leaving NCR  to manage the Computer Technology department of the Control Data Institute in London.  I would love to make contact and chat with engineers who I might have trained in those early days. The 12 years I spent with NCR were certainly the challenging and the most enjoyable of my career in the computer industry (I am now retired)

Hello Terry
in the first row of 315-engineers from germany were to my knowledge Dieter Huke, Günther Seitz, Günter (?) Elzholtz and, I'm not quite shure, Klaus (?) Hintze, all trained in Hawthorn. The second row was made up of Walter Frank, Herwart Rose, Manfred Schmidtz   and Reinhold Schrader (thats me, at the age of 30) We, together with others, were the first class, trained 1962 in Borehamwood with Dr. Riedle as instructor. He was kept quite busy, to manage the school, organise all things nessesary to run such objekt, settling things for his family to move to London and teaching students. So there was a lot of self-studying time, until Dudly Lowe took over. After returning to germany I was on site at "Lufthansa Computer Center" in Harksheide together with Dieter Huke. After an update to 315-RMC in Dayton, I became a "flying engineer" called to different sites, either for troubleshooting, installation or just for filling holes, until in Aug.1969 I came back to London for a 615-100/200 course at ITEC North-Circular-Road together with Wolfgang Jahnke. From that time, I remember Gordon Catchpole. During that time, I gave privat lessons to 315 students Manfred Morlock, Hans-Günter Kieserling and another guy at my home in Finchley. Since I had some field-experiens, I think, they might have learned a little bit from that. My last course in the UK was 1977 on an M05 basic. Our instructor introduced himself with the words: "My name is John, and I like" - by that he pointed to a big logo placed on the front of his desk - "Glenfiddich!" He of course let us know, why he liked Glenfiddich, and since then, it is also my favorite brand.

Reading in the forum wakes up old times, with struggles and success, with travelling and meetings of other people, with joy and feeling bad, - just old times.

Best regards
Reinhold

WOW I never heard of a disk on a 500. I left Chicago and all service of the 500's in 1976. Went to Cambridge OH to be a specialist on the Retail 725 systems. I too do not know of any command that would run a disk, or think of any other command that could be modified to run one. Could the disk be an aftermarket unit? Europe only thing? I'll pass this on to another 500 service man from Chicago that worked on them longer than I.

Hello Richard,

in the "last days" of the NCR 500 the 500-users could buy a disk to connect to the system. This was a very seldom peripheral, and I got now  a photo of the disk.

 I'm trying to get more information about the disk and how to operate this unit and how it was organized (Table of contents?). Yesterday I looked at the 500 machine command table and found no command to write to and to read from the disk.

As a former 500 field engineer - do you know anything about this disk?

Heiko

Hi JJ,

I remember talking to you several times in R.B.  I think the first time was when I ran a DynaProbe on a large Century 200 site running a B2 partition under B3 at the United Bank in Denver in the early '70s.  My analysis showed that a large portion of the processor time was spent in the B2 OCD.  You became involved and made significant efficiency improvements in the OCD based on that analysis as I recall.  I also spent quite a bit of time working with Berry Gilmore's Systems Services team in Rancho Bernardo.

Herb Fish

I enjoyed seeing the photo of the Century 300 console.  It brought back many memories.  I worked in Systems Services out of the 741 building in Dayton and provided field support for the B4 Operating System.

Hello JJW,

i can't remember any possibility on the Century under B1/B2/B3 to have index-sequential access to data files using NEAT/3. How could that work? Can you explain?
When using "Cobol74" there was a in-built index-sequential access.
As written, on VRX with NEAT/VS you can use "CAM"-Files.

Hello JimT,

yes, the CRAM was available on the Century. I remember during the C-200 education at the ITEC London (North Circular Road) in 1972 glancing stunned at this strange peripheral. I've never seen a CRAM on a Century in the field -  thanks God!

Heiko