At 05:03 +0100 on 02/03/2006, Chris Mason wrote about Re: Is VIO mandatory?:
Hal, What tales hang by these threads! The mention of COBOL and its work files brought to mind a little exercise born of naivety. I was supporting a DOS (that's the DOS that ran on the 360/30) customer and thought I'd encourage a programmer who was the Miss COBOL of the installation to innovate by assigning the work files to scratch tapes rather than disk extents for her next compile just to see what would happen. It was most impressive - never mind whether or not it was more efficient. Had I ever subsequently been asked by a film crew how best to present a "computer" I now had a ready answer. Running a DOS COBOL compilation with work files on tape gives just the right impression of a "billion dollar brain" cogitating. Chris Mason
Having first started programming in a TOS (TAPE Operating System) environment, I can agree that watching the work tapes was interesting (this was in the era where a Hollywood "computer" was spinning tapes, blinking lights and/or a working card sorter [Dragnet loved to use card sorters to do a criminal record search with the correct suspect being the one card that ended up in its own pocket]) . Throwing in another TOS war story, the first thing that was done after we did any updating to the SYSRES tape was to make two backup copies. This was needed due to the average life of the SYSRES's media being from 1 to 2 weeks before the tape burned out (due to all the use it got). When it started to fail, we'd swap in one of the backups (by shutting down and rebooting). At least this was an era before the 2415 or the operators would have gone nuts/deaf from the rewind HONK.
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