On Sun, 2022-08-28 at 17:06 -0700, Keith Smith via PLUG-discuss wrote: > In the early 80's I heard about operators. Never did meet an operator.
In the days of mainframes and groups of minicomputers (VAX, PDP-11, etc) they had server rooms, air conditioned down into the low 70s or high 60s. They were noisy, foreboding places. I know because, during a dispute with an igno manager, I stopped working in the office and started working second shift in the server room. My productivity probably went up at least 50 percent. Patrolling the server room was a man or woman called a computer operator, or "operator" for short. The operator moved from tape drive to tape drive, backing up machines and installing things. They tended to a fleet of 132 character tractor feed printers, putting print jobs in the proper in boxes, and installing new paper when the printers ran out. In time-sharing environments, they'd schedule jobs. And most important, when a program crashed, they'd either restart it or try to fix it, and if they couldn't, they'd call the programmer. In the 1970's I had a programmer girlfriend, and she regularly got 2am phone calls telling her to drive to the server room *right now*. Every computer operator I ever met was a nice person and was interested in cooperating with programmers. They knew the value of programmers, and programmers knew the value of operators. When easy to use MS-DOS took over, any intelligent person could be their own operator, so operator positions declined dramatically. But I'll bet they still have operators (no matter what they're called today) in large server arrays for the big online providers. Somebody needs to physically swap the bad hard disk or swap the computer that stopped working. SteveT --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - [email protected] To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
