Discussion on:

10 things I miss about Big Iron

Cleaning out the punched card machines.

Nice memories as you pointed out.

I think I arrogantly miss the priesthood the most. Now every schmuck that uses facebook feels free to tell me how to run multinational business systems...."dude" you have no idea...

When I was working with those machines while in college, we had to warn people against using the punchouts as confetti - the card punch chips had sharp edges and could damage one's eyes.

The paper tape holes had some oil on them, and they would stick to stuff - and reappear often months later.

Our Banks IBM S E was great & taught me all my initial lessons in the 60's about how to set up o NOP area to use for getting a program to run using the toggle switches after a crash due to as program error

I too was a banker; I wasn't in the DP department, but ran Proof & Transit. Sometimes I went into the computer room to make a quite transit (check distribution) run. The program kept stopping and required the then-familiar control-blank-interrupt combination to start again. After doing this perhaps a hundred times I pushed the Interrupt right out of its panel mounting. I finished the run by opening the panel, fishing out the Interrupt button which I held in my hand, pushing constantly until the run was finished. Oh, this was on a 360 Mod 30.
Allen

I miss VMS on MicroVax and Alpha
Best operating system, I've ever used.
Good kit as well.

Odd as it sounds, I miss doing PMs on the touchy old Honeywell tape drives. Aligning the heads and setting the vacuum just so then experiencing the thrill of seeing and hearing it run perfectly... for a while. Then there was the satisfaction of "reading" the holes on a paper tape, just to see the total amazement on the face of one of our Pointy-Haired Boss's.

It's just not the same anymore. sigh.

I remember updating the Registrar's DECtapes. I would keep from getting bored by seeing how many characters I could type before the PDP-8 caught up with me and echoed them.

That, obviously, was for the eventuality that the computer, evolved into full sentience, turned out to be hostile
They did think of everything...

I was told that you never pulled that emergency off switch unless someone was being electrocuted. And especially if it was an IBM CE or SE ... they could be replaced easily, unlike the machine.

unlike the big machine...

If an Apprentice walked in while I was working on the thing to Pull that Handle.

That's what it was put there for to keep Apprentices away.

Those where the days though Fun Times with great Hardware. Though I didn't like the Hydraulic Drives as they tended to sprout leaks and people like me had to fix them. Only time you got drowned in nasty stuff though.

Col

Of course! NOW it makes sense ...

We were working in the machine room, and the CE came to work on a line printer. We let him in, then he started out to get some parts.

When he got to the door, he pushed it and it was locked. He said "How do you get out?" The operator replied "Just push the button there by the door."

Of course, there were TWO buttons by the door, one was a simple doorbell button and the other was the big red "Emergency" button.

You can guess which one the CE pushed.

That was the emergency power-down; two of the disk packs had head crashes during EPO, and several tapes and peripherals were also damaged. It took 12 weeks for IBM to get all of the parts and tweaks in place for the system to be fully operational again, and everything that administration had done since the previous night's backup were lost. Of course they were thrilled about that...

And IBM took it on the chin for that one, because it was their CE who pushed the wrong button and made such a mess...

But many years ago when we had Halon Fire Suppression I did trigger the Fire Suppression System which locked the doors and placed the People inside on Oxygen.

Pity that the Powers that be at that place who where in attendance at the time refused to have the O2 System operational.

They where panicking and running around taking the Emergency O2 Bottles off the workers and asking what do we do now?

My reply was die as that Emergency portable Bottle lasts 5 minutes and it takes the Fire Brigade 15 minutes to get here to let us out.

They say a Picture is worth a Thousand Words but I would insist that, that picture was worth million of words.

I just loved pulling System tests when no one else in the place knew about them.

Col

Let's not waste precious oxygen! It costs money! Why are you all turning blue? Suck it up people, I can get workers from India who'll go three days without breathing!!!

Those are sadhu's obviously....

It was all of the dead managers who they where about to loose.

Now try to insist that I sign off on something substandard again and see what happens.

Col

Trouble shooting down to the individual card with an o-scope and fixing the card by replacing a, err, what were those bulky things called, yes transistor, actually using a soldering iron.

But even better was aligning tape drives, disk drives and card reader/punches, a lot of delicate electro-mechanical stuff to be dealt with.

Fun times indeed.

Jaime is so correct. I miss the RCA 501 so very much. It was such a joy to operate, watch and use.

I miss one of the managers coming in with his kids at the weekend to "show them around" (euphemism for "pose"), and one of the little brats hitting the 'all stop' button.

It was then that I discovered punching a board member in the mouth isn't the best career move.

Thank you very much for this article. Brought back many great memories. Of men and machines.

Started with a 1620, moved to a 1401, then to a 7094/7044 DCS and then to an IBM 360/65 and finally the 360/91. Brings back fond memories of being my own operator and being able to hang tape with the best of our professional operators. I thought the 360/20 was IBM's gift to the EAM world. And the 360/30 was a gift to the 1401 crowd and the 360/65 was a gift to the 7094 group. Every machine was a delight. There is nothing like being a programmer and running your own programs in a big shop instead of sticking card decks (actually multiple boxes of cards) in a cubbyhole and waiting for the results or a core dump. Or the agony of loading ten boxes of cards (20,000 cards) only to see a system message saying "Flushing job, searching for next job card." Or knowing another 10 cyclinder extent would have kept the job from bombing.

Today, my toys are faster and more sophisticated than those machines. Now if only I could attach a channel box and run an IBM 3800 printer at 20,000 lpm.

My first was the 1620 as well.

The most fun: making it do math in octal for a cross-assembler.

If you put an AM radio next to the control panel and you could hear noise of various frequencies generated by the machine. The tighter the loop, the higher the tone. I finally wrote an assembler that turned notes into loops of various instructions and had a blast. I can still count by twelves and remember if you missed the flag, you could easily wrap core. A TI speak-and-spell has more memory and computing power than my first 1620 with 40K of real core.

One thing I remember are the IBM 1403 line printer. They were so loud and always was the source for fun. The first thing you learn with the 1403 is not to put your coffee on top because it would raise when it was out of paper. I think everyone in the computer center had to clean up their coffee at least once. One time they had to lift a floor tile near the printer and everything was covered in dried coffee!

I remember receiving a tape that had images that was marked as being from Doug Comer (author of "Internetworking with TCP/IP") with pictures that can be printed on the 1403. In order to print then pictures, you had to submit a job that requested a formatting tape that removed the top and bottom margins and requested that the job be printed on the back of the green bar paper.

Oh yea... what happened to the green bar paper and the volumes of output printed on that paper?

Then there was the printer music! Someone figured out how to send a series of lines to the printer to have it make music. It was so cool!

I also used the Control Data Corp 6600, Cyber 70/74, and Cyber 170. These Seymour Cray designed machines were great processing engine. Too bad Cyber NOS was one of the worst operating systems ever. It was full of security holes and could be taken over with an ordinary user account!

Of course having to fix the darn thing in shirt and tie meant you probably needed a new shirt since we were up to our ears in ink and oil... guess what, I miss it too.

Do you remember the print job that printed out a large footprint?

We didn't have raised floors so when we had to show off the computer for management we would run that print job & raise the cover.

Then we'd ask, "All right, someone stepped on a cable. Who did that?"

We still have a box of green bar paper stashed away, and I was looking at an old report on greenbar just last week.

We're keeping that old box of paper just because we can, and so we can show the "young 'uns" what real printing was about.

Sorry, but I don't miss "bursting" continuous green bar paper even though I became quite good at the job.

I do miss what looked to be 16" platters visible through a small window of the 100MB hard drives that took up the same space as a washing machine. A room was filled with 'em!

I miss having exactly 66 lines of 132 columns with a single fixed pitch font. Labels were 6 lines, 1-up. You knew in advance if columns were aligned, whether or not text would fit, and you could read the output without squinting.

No complaints or trouble tickets because some moron decides to print in 18 point Comic Sans.

I miss the green bar paper, too. I'm a math teacher now and it makes for great scratch paper.

We printed to paper tape, chad-less too! (An earlier upgrade) It had a typing reperf but I can't recall the model, typed right on the paper tape. Remote interaction was done on a Teletype corporation model 35 console and another teletype attached to the IBM 1620. I think we had a dedicated 56k connection for the thing back to the university. By the way, our "broadband" if you will, cost us $700.00 a month for that 56k circuit. Yeah, I too miss those days too. That was when you weren't embarrassed to admit you worked with "Computers". Some days I'd rather be a plumber.

Yep almost anything is better than being a Windows Cleaner these days.

Col

remember, the awesome black and white picture of the moon that the printer would printout over several sheets of paper which you'd then tape together and stick on the wall....

If you are going to have printer picture memories, why not the naked girl picture composed by an artfully arranged set of uppercase letters? It helped to know that you would get this small reward after working through the night to complete a system upgrade.

We had to make due with a very good representation of the Mona Lisa.
But the operators did get bored one year and decided to create their own master pieces - Frosty, a 4ft Christmas tree with lights, ornaments, etc and Santa in his sleigh, pulled by all the reindeer! These were actually big hits with the school kids that came in for tours - we'd fire up the printer, turn off the autostacker in the back and make them try to catch and fold them as they printed (no one ever succeeded).

Well I do miss those things. But I REALLY miss those 407 plugboards and the 1401/1410 upsi switches - as we applied thm to 360/DOS programs before the advent of 360/OS.

The priesthood is still there, but in some organizations it has transformed from the benevolent goal of user service to an oppressive, desperate attempt to retain authority and relevance. The new mantra is control at all costs, irrespective of the consequences.

In the big iron days, nobody called us the "preventers of information services" or the "Information Taliban" department.

I miss assembler. Today when you write some code, there's more code running your code than the code you wrote. And that other code was written by cretins who think that a programming error per ten-LOC is acceptable. I miss knowing what every bit will do.

I don't miss the concept of writing complicated code in assembler to accomplish trivial things. I liked writing in C and using function libraries to let me concentrate on the parts of my program that were truly unique. But as C led to C++ and then Java, the library led to the API and ultimately the dreaded "framework". It seems that the concept that freed us from the tyranny of assembler has locked us into something just as bad. Object oriented programming gives us amazing ways to recycle objects, at the risk of memory leaks and other debugging hassles that make assembler look like the good old days. Instead of knowing what every bit will do, we are lucky to know what every object will do! Maybe I miss assembler more than I thought.

Wow, obviously you're not a born programmer. It's only ASM (or BAL in this case) that gives true freedom. No having to work around some other guy's philosophy, no trying to figure out some other guy's conventions, no constraints, just direct access to the hardware and OS. You can do anything!

I remember when we converted a FORTRAN program to extract customer gas usage records to COBOL. When the FORTRAN program ran, we could see the tape drives move in jerky fashion. Using the COBOL program the tape drives spun like crazy! What a dramatic difference to witness.