I am not a huge fan of these nostalgia thread drifts but here's my contribution.
Somewhere in the early 1970's I did a lot of software development on rented time. One place I rented time from -- cannot place anything about it other than this part -- they had two machines and as I recall four banks of eight 2401's each. Two of the banks were switchable to either machine. I bought time third shift (because it was cheaper). When I got there they would be running these HUGE tape sorts. Tape sorts are a real thing of beauty, with half of the tape drives running backwards at any given time. The third shift operators -- and anyone who has known third shift operators will understand this story -- would go out on the fire escape and light up a little illegal substance and then come back and turn off all the machine room lights* and then sit there and groove on all the blinking lights of 24 tape drives running a tape sort. I didn't participate in the illegal substances -- I did partake in those days but can't work in that state -- but the 2401's in the darkened machine room WERE amazing. Charles *An early example of lights-out operations. -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.) Sent: Sunday, April 14, 2013 3:18 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: 'Hacking The Mainframe': What Hollywood Gets Wrong About Its Favorite Tech In <[email protected]>, on 04/12/2013 at 11:41 PM, Dale Miller <[email protected]> said: >It wasn't always blinking lights that the public and Hollywood equated >to computers. I think that of the movies I have seen, most of them >focused (pun not intended) on spinning reel-to-reel tape drives. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
