>
> I was doing work on an IBM System/3 in those days, as well as on
> an old Burrought B-7700. The Burroughs could only be fed through punched
> cards (always racing to get the optical reader which was 40 times faster
> than the mechanical one! ;-) for the average user, there were no keyboard
> terminals attached. Except for the console, which had it's own printer for
> system output. On that machine, programs could not be bigger than 64K
> (equal to the IBM S/3). It had 1 meg of RAM, which was an indecent amount
> already. It was for a technical highschool, had 200 users on it. (Try that
> on the average machine these days, with 128Megs hahaha!)
> System crashes would be saved on a special 64Meg removable diskpack, which
> we would then debug by hand.
Strike one for bloatware, I agree. I once set up a 50-user stock control
system running on a low-end 486 with 16Mb RAM with Novel NetWare 3.12...
We had a similar machine to yours at the college I was at. It was almost
embarrassingly easy to hack. I remember one kid who was most unpopular (for
good reason), who happened to be blighted with a bad case of acne. Someone
modified his project so that, on running, it printed a plethora of comments
suggesting a visual similarity between his countenance and the topping of a
'House Special' pizza #;-D
At one of the places I used to work we used to have an old PRIME dinosaur.
This was the size of a small family car, and had the performance of a
mid-range 386 (blisteringly fast in it's time!). All word-processing and
spreadsheet work for 300 users used to be done on it, as well as CAD!
However, as the software grew, it got to the stage that a page-down on a
spreadsheet took (perhaps conveniently!) approximately the same length of
time as a trip to the coffee machine...
It was in it's own air-conditioned room, protected with the most evil halon
fire-extinguisher system I'd ever seen. (If the ceiling tiles started to
fly, you had about 5 seconds to get out of the room before you
suffocated...)
The company purchased it in the 70s for $600,000, and sold it in 1995 for
$600, to the only company we could find who didn't want US to pay THEM to
take it off our hands. We had to take the wall down to get it out...
But, the mother of them all was the CICS mainframe. This was the size of my
apartment, with valves (ObTeenager - glass vacuum tubes that functioned as
transistors!) and was WATER-COOLED!!!! Believe it or not, we only retired
it six years ago! This ran a basic MRP system, written in a horrible
mixture of COBOL and FORTRAN.
The CICS machine was replaced with a single RS6000. The PRIME mini was
replaced by a trio of Pentium PCs running Novell NetWare. All the dumb
terminals were replaced with diskless workstations (which sucked!). At
least we now had color screens, instead of the green (or even worse, amber)
screens.
> On the IBM we had been messing so much that not much of the executable
> code had any bearing to its source code. Usually we'd patch the hex code
> directly in memory and dump that back to disk. Using an 8 bit switch array
> on the machine itself. Such fun!! ;)
I remember being insanely jealous of the guys who could toggle in the
bootstrap code without touching the manual...
Regards,
Ozz.
