Sales brochure
The GE sales kit with abacus and slide rule
Ah, yes, I remember it well. But as I recall, our first card reader was made by Bull, a French outfit. It was soon replaced with an IBM reader that had a vastly higher stacking capacity. I remember the slow speed of the Bull and its swivel output stacker that held only a couple of inches of cards.Other people recorded similar war-stories of the GE 225's shortcomings
Our printer was an on-line/off-line Analex, with a 1,000 lines per minute maximum. It had its own tape drive and buttons for selecting which one or combination of print records to process from tape. That way, we could run detailed reports selecting 2 or more print record flags, then run a summary using just the records flagged as total lines. We did a lot of off-line printing, including about a million mailing labels per month. Girl Scouts bought Cheshire label machines and the magazine printer liked them so much they bought the machines from us. There was a big saving in formatting 4-up east-west labels compared with 1-up Addressograph format labels.
Professors John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth Collegeand another reference
in New Hampshire implemented the first complete version of BASIC
on a time-shared General Electric GE-225 computer in 1964.
They published the first BASIC user manual that year too
By 1963, the LGP-30 has become outdatedAnd wikipedia.org/wiki/GE-200_series
and Dartmouth replaced it with General Electric GE-225 and Datanet-30 computers.
Kurtz supervised the development of a timesharing system for the GE computers.
At the same time, Kemeny developed a compiler
for the next experimental Dartmouth programming language,
the Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code - or BASIC.
Through the early 1960s GE worked with Dartmouth College on the development of a time-sharing operating system, which would later go on to become Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS). The system was constructed by attaching a number of teletypewriters to a smaller GE machine called the Datanet-30, which was a small computer that had evolved from an earlier process-control machine.
DTSS was an odd system; it didn't run on the GE-235, but the DN-30 instead. The DN-30 accepted commands one at a time from the terminals connected to it, and then ran their requested programs on the GE-235. The GE-235 had no idea it was not running in batch mode, and the illusion of multitasking was being maintained externally.
In 1965 GE started packaging the DN-30 and GE-235 systems together as the GE-265. The GE-265 achieved fame not only for being the first commercially successful time-sharing system, but it was also the machine on which the BASIC programming language was first created.
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analog or digital? | |
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Here's a pouch with abacus and slide rule
explaining how GE made both analog & digital computers |
| The abacus is set to 225 |
| The pamphlet for abacus, slide rule & sales |
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Notice the phone numbers:
This is before area codes! They list the exchanges by name! |
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How to use the abacus.
"bi-quinary is found in some modern digital computers also" "for more advanced instruction … write to one of our abacus-expert Sales Engineers" |
| Some GE computers: 210, 225, 307, 309, 312 |
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How to use the slide rule: only A B CI C D scales.
The S, T and L scales must've been an RFQ :-) |
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Back cover: General Electric Computer Department Phoenix, Arizona (no zip code yet!) Apparently printed August 1960 |
 
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The GE slide rule body: back and front (with slide removed to see inner printing) |
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The GE slide rule's slide: front and back
(to show additional conversion charts) |
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This 6 inch slide rule is NOT by GE but I poked it into the case since it's so similar to the GE slide rule. It adds the K scale for cubes. I removed the magnifying cursor for scanning. |
| It came with more thorough instructions. |