[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by PeterT

We almost need an I'm an old nerd thread.

My first exposure to computing was in Grade 8 and was via a 2741 terminal to IBM using APL. The next year we switched to IP Sharp and their APL environment. Skip forward a few years and we also had an IBM 5150 running APL. The next year (my final High School) we moved to an HP 9830A which used Basic, and had both a cassette tape for storage and a card reader (pencil marked, not punched).

I never had to deal with APL. An old friend is an APL specialist, and once worked in the APL group at IBM. He recounted talking to an APL vendor on behalf of a client, and saying "I need to see your source code to confirm it is suitable for my client."

"You can't do that. We don't provide source."

"Okay, I'll disassemble a binary."

"If you can do that, we'll give a you a doctorate!"

"I already have one."

"Okay, we'll give you an office next to (APL creator) Ken Iverson!"

"I used to have one."

Game, set, and match.

He still programs in APL, using a descendant called K, and claims to be able to deliver completed applications in the time other developers spend figuring out how long it will take them to do it.

After that it was off to University where I was exposed to Burroughs 6700 via timesharing, an IBM 360 via punched cards and LSI-11s running RT 11. Of course in first year my friends and I used the LSI 11s to enter our assignments, sent them to the 6700 and on to a high speed card punch, before feeding the card deck into the card reader on the 360. It sure made getting nicely formatted punched cards easy.

We had card readers at the bank, but I don't recall them ever being used.

I dealt with virtual punch cards, as 80 column card images in a PDS file. Much more convenient than paper, and no need to play "52,000 pickup" when you dropped a card deck.

Then that summer off to a job where we had an Amdahl V6 and a Dec-10, and a conversion project was underway from MFT to MVS. I still marvel at the fact that the V6 had a whopping 8 MB of memory, and it supported most of the data processing for an international company!

Never dealt with Amdahl kit, but mainframes could do amazing things.

When I arrived, the bank I worked at had built out a regional data center, and managed to bring it in for just under $1 million. (I saw the original RFP.) To do so, they went third-party and plug compatible. The mainframe was an ITEL box that was 370 equivalent, and supported 500 remote 3270 terminals through TCAM and CICS under OS-VS1. It had 2MB physical memory and 16MB virtual memory. It was fine, when it worked, but outages were frequent, in part due to not running current IBM OS releases because the machine wasn't from IBM.

I had a photocopy of a cartoon from Datamation in my cube, with the field engineer walking into a customer site saying "System been down long?", and addressing the question to a skeleton covered with cobwebs in a swivel chair in a cube set up like mine. Someone made a copy of it and taped it up on the inside of the VP of IT's office door. He was not amused.

He had also come up through the ranks as a COBOL programmer, and there was still a module on the system he maintained to keep his hand in. He sat down at the terminal to do some work on his program, and Lo! The system was down. The systems programmer spluttered and turned purple when I told him about it. He dreaded on line demos, for good reason.

They subsequently replaced the ITEL box with a pair of genuine IBM 4341s running MVS, loosely coupled under JES2, and reliability soared. Of course, around the time the data center truly hit its stride, the decision was made to re-centralize everything back at the Division level. (Never mind that the two year applications backlog at Division was what made the region build out it's own data center...)

Those were the days!

They were indeed. I enjoyed it, but I'm not certain I'd want to do it again There are too many new and different mistakes to make.
______
Dennis