"Have you any experience in running a high-speed digital electronic computer?"
"Yes, I have."
"Where?"
"My aunt has one."
"And what does your aunt do?"
"I can't recall."
eeeeeeeewww
...think happy thoughts
...think happy thoughts
IPL decks, 3420 tape drives, 3850 removable spindles, JES2, JCL, TOS, ISPF, Hex Dumps (including the hated SS instruction), BALR, saveareas, 24 vs 32 bit mode, SVC calls, CCWs
... ah memories
The author obviously has never seen a mainframe.
I couldn’t begin to count how many clients of mine over the years have had their data on the venerable AS400.
Hollerith card swallowing monsters
I liked VAXes ànd PDPs myself.
The clouds are filled with dinosaurs.
There are still jobs mainframes do that servers can’t. Or that nobody in his right mind would want them doing. And the more powerful servers get, the more like mainframes they become, until the distinction is nominal.
"Have you any experience in running a high-speed digital electronic computer?"
"Yes, I have."
"Where?"
"My aunt has one."
"And what does your aunt do?"
"I can't recall."
I loved going through core dumps and coding in BAL. I got good at debugging that hex code but there was a lot of stress to get everything fixed fast. Kinda miss some of it but time moves on.
I almost got my shawl caught in the card reader. Lucky it wasn't my hair. Some jams, not too bad.
Remember the long shelf with the books? I confess I had to learn with a dumbed down version . . .
160K bytes of core! Multiple high-density tape drives. I liked autocoder. I started later that decade. Used to have to walk five miles through knee-deep snow carrying boxes of (2000 IIRC)punch cards to the machine room and carry back stacks of printouts from yesterday's runs.
Obsolete language, obsolete computer, obsolete olde engineer....good thing we are all happily retired.
My first job in IT was as an operator on a IBM VSE system back in the late 80s. Punch cards & reel to reels, dumb terminals... fun stuff.
I see the staff overseeing these computers haven't changed a bit.
Geeezz, there were IBM machines before the 360. I was 19 when I cut my teeth on the IBM 650 with a RAMAC (very large disk drive with 3 moving arms) that would almost walk across the floor when it was sorting. Wrote code in SOAP.
And after that were the very popular 1401 and 1440 on which we wrote Autocoder. The banking industry loved those machines!! Well, back in the 60s that is. It was kinda fun to literally know how the insides of a machine worked in order to write code. Moved on to the GE 635 and COBOL and left the IBM stuff behind.
Reminds me of how Ross Perot brilliantly LEASED surplus IBM mainframe time at a discount to make BILLIONS processing Medicare payments for Uncle Sam, and sold the company for $2.4 billion. IBM thought he was nuts (just as they could have bought Microsoft for a song).