Re: Early 360 machines (Was: Front panel switches - what did they do?)

[Paul Berger]

On 2016-05-26 1:43 PM, Jon Elson wrote:

On 05/26/2016 08:54 AM, Paul Koning wrote:


Speaking of ribbons, in college I occasionally used a type of ribbon 
I've never seen on line printers since: a film ribbon. Think of the 
"letter quality" ribbons used on professional typewriters, or daisy 
wheel printers, a thin plastic film with some carbon-like coating on 
one side.  Now make one the width of a line printer ribbon.


Our 360/44 normally used a regular cloth ribbon, but a film ribbon 
could be mounted if desired.  I did so to print my honor's thesis, 
using the film ribbon and the upper/lower case print train (TN 
train?) to print the final text (from RUNOFF on our PDP-11 system, 
which had no line printer).


Yes, that's exactly the purpose they were for.  You mounted the text 
train and a film ribbon, and got a fairly nice looking printout. IBM's 
early manuals were all printed this way, the look was pretty iconic.  
The printed output was then photographed to make offset printing 
plates.  (Later they used IBM composer word processing printers, and 
they looked nicer, with proportional spacing.)


Jon
Not just manuals but also the ALD logic diagrams they where printed on a 
1403 with a special print train.


Paul.

Re: Early 360 machines (Was: Front panel switches - what did they do?)

[Jon Elson]

On 05/26/2016 12:33 PM, Brent Hilpert wrote:

On 2016-May-25, at 6:14 PM, Jon Elson wrote:

On 05/25/2016 05:31 PM, Noel Chiappa wrote:

 > From: Jon Elson

 >> I interned at IBM Bermuda, and they had a 360/20 as their main service
 >> bureau machine; it had (IIRC) ... a 4301 printer.

 > I'm guessing, maybe, that would be a 1403 printer?

Ah, right you are! The old grey cells are, well, old! ;-)

Those printers had an amazingly long life! They were first introduced in 1959
with the 1401 computer, and, like I said, the brand spanking new System 3
they got in ca. 1976 came with one! I wonder when IBM stopped producing
them?



I believe IBM recycled them from retired machines for an amazing length of 
time.  Certainly, a number of 1403s were in use on 370 and even later systems.  
I was recently surprised while digging at bitsavers to find out how ancient the 
2821 controller was - all SMS cards and some very ingenious magnetic 
transformer tricks to do the address selection of the core stack with as few 
transistors as possible.  (The 2821 was the controller for the card read/punch 
as well as the 1403 printer family.)


A 1403 was in use at UBC for undergrad batch services up till the end of that 
service in 1979/80.

I used to get a kick out of pushing the button to raise the cabinet shroud. The 
big shroud would rattle and shake as the motor-chain drive raised it to expose 
the print mechanism, all while it continued to print, and the noise level would 
go up by some tens of db.

At least I presume it was a 1403, it looked like just like this:
http://ibm-1401.info/1403Cable-PP-04-.jpg


Yes, that would be the 1403-N1, the top of the line.  1100 
LPM, and had the motorized cover and totally enclosed 
cabinet, for noise suppression.  The cover also raised 
automatically whenever the printer had a check, mostly for 
out of paper.  That could happen in barely 15 minutes or so 
when printing less-dense output.


Jon

Re: Early 360 machines (Was: Front panel switches - what did they do?)

[Brent Hilpert]

On 2016-May-25, at 6:14 PM, Jon Elson wrote:
> On 05/25/2016 05:31 PM, Noel Chiappa wrote:
>> > From: Jon Elson
>> 
>> >> I interned at IBM Bermuda, and they had a 360/20 as their main service
>> >> bureau machine; it had (IIRC) ... a 4301 printer.
>> 
>> > I'm guessing, maybe, that would be a 1403 printer?
>> 
>> Ah, right you are! The old grey cells are, well, old! ;-)
>> 
>> Those printers had an amazingly long life! They were first introduced in 1959
>> with the 1401 computer, and, like I said, the brand spanking new System 3
>> they got in ca. 1976 came with one! I wonder when IBM stopped producing
>> them?
>> 
>> 
> I believe IBM recycled them from retired machines for an amazing length of 
> time.  Certainly, a number of 1403s were in use on 370 and even later 
> systems.  I was recently surprised while digging at bitsavers to find out how 
> ancient the 2821 controller was - all SMS cards and some very ingenious 
> magnetic transformer tricks to do the address selection of the core stack 
> with as few transistors as possible.  (The 2821 was the controller for the 
> card read/punch as well as the 1403 printer family.)


A 1403 was in use at UBC for undergrad batch services up till the end of that 
service in 1979/80.

I used to get a kick out of pushing the button to raise the cabinet shroud. The 
big shroud would rattle and shake as the motor-chain drive raised it to expose 
the print mechanism, all while it continued to print, and the noise level would 
go up by some tens of db.

At least I presume it was a 1403, it looked like just like this:
http://ibm-1401.info/1403Cable-PP-04-.jpg

Re: Early 360 machines (Was: Front panel switches - what did they do?)

[Chuck Guzis]

On 05/26/2016 06:51 AM, Paul Koning wrote:

> Apart from that, it's not credible for another reason.  CDC Cyber
> operating systems always spooled printer output to disk (unlike
> OS/360 which did it in some variants but not others -- notably not
> OS/360 PCP which I used since our 360/44 wasn't big enough to do
> better).  So a call to DMP would run only long enough do perform the
> formatting of whatever memory was being dumped, writing the resulting
> text to the disk file named "OUTPUT" for the invoking process
> ("control point").

It *is* possible for a job to REQUEST access to an online printer under
both SCOPE and KRONOS.  But it requires operator intervention, IIRC.

Deadstart (postmortem) dumps, of course, didn't use any intermediate
programs--they dumped directly to the printer.  IIRC, you could also
dump to tape.

--Chuck

Re: Early 360 machines (Was: Front panel switches - what did they do?)

[Jon Elson]

On 05/26/2016 08:54 AM, Paul Koning wrote:



Speaking of ribbons, in college I occasionally used a type of ribbon I've never seen on 
line printers since: a film ribbon.  Think of the "letter quality" ribbons used 
on professional typewriters, or daisy wheel printers, a thin plastic film with some 
carbon-like coating on one side.  Now make one the width of a line printer ribbon.

Our 360/44 normally used a regular cloth ribbon, but a film ribbon could be 
mounted if desired.  I did so to print my honor's thesis, using the film ribbon 
and the upper/lower case print train (TN train?) to print the final text (from 
RUNOFF on our PDP-11 system, which had no line printer).

Yes, that's exactly the purpose they were for.  You mounted 
the text train and a film ribbon, and got a fairly nice 
looking printout. IBM's early manuals were all printed this 
way, the look was pretty iconic.  The printed output was 
then photographed to make offset printing plates.  (Later 
they used IBM composer word processing printers, and they 
looked nicer, with proportional spacing.)


Jon

Re: Early 360 machines (Was: Front panel switches - what did they do?)

[Paul Koning]

> On May 25, 2016, at 10:58 PM, Chuck Guzis  wrote:
> 
> On 05/25/2016 07:22 PM, Paul Berger wrote:
> 
>> Speaking of dumps I remember an engineer friend telling me that at
>> the university that he went to they had a CDC Cyber system and they 
>> discovered that you could initiate a dump from any workstation, and
>> the system would dump out to the printer and while it was dumping the
>> whole system came to a halt guess what the students where fond
>> of doing..  It would seem to me that something like that should
>> have been more restricted.
> 
> At least in SCOPE and KRONOS, DMP was the command to dump memory--but if
> initiated from a user's control point, it would dump only the user's FL,
> not the whole system.  So the story seems to be a bit apocryphal to me.
>  Most university systems charged not only by the CPU second, but also
> by the number of lines printed and the number of cards punched.

Apart from that, it's not credible for another reason.  CDC Cyber operating 
systems always spooled printer output to disk (unlike OS/360 which did it in 
some variants but not others -- notably not OS/360 PCP which I used since our 
360/44 wasn't big enough to do better).  So a call to DMP would run only long 
enough do perform the formatting of whatever memory was being dumped, writing 
the resulting text to the disk file named "OUTPUT" for the invoking process 
("control point").

paul

Re: Early 360 machines (Was: Front panel switches - what did they do?)

[Paul Koning]

> On May 25, 2016, at 9:16 PM, Paul Berger  wrote:
> 
>> ...
> Yeah I watch some of the large system guys disassemble and repair trains and 
> of course when you put them back together you had to make sure the slugs 
> where all in the right order.   We had customers that would buy 3rd party 
> ribbons that where practically dripping with ink that would gum up everything 
> in the machine.

Speaking of ribbons, in college I occasionally used a type of ribbon I've never 
seen on line printers since: a film ribbon.  Think of the "letter quality" 
ribbons used on professional typewriters, or daisy wheel printers, a thin 
plastic film with some carbon-like coating on one side.  Now make one the width 
of a line printer ribbon.

Our 360/44 normally used a regular cloth ribbon, but a film ribbon could be 
mounted if desired.  I did so to print my honor's thesis, using the film ribbon 
and the upper/lower case print train (TN train?) to print the final text (from 
RUNOFF on our PDP-11 system, which had no line printer).

paul

Re: Early 360 machines (Was: Front panel switches - what did they do?)

[jwsmobile]

At UMR, for whatever reason they had no carriage control on tape channel 
12.  If you were a clever (and unpopular) coder you could skip to 
channel 12 an accomplish the same thing.


Programming languages in the shop had library overrides to make that a 
carriage control (another channel) but assembler programs could do it 
directly.


Thanks
Jim

On 5/25/2016 5:17 PM, Paul Berger wrote:
It was always interesting when someone put a carriage control tape on 
backwards or didn't lower the brushes, the first skip would empty the 
box and the paper would be all packed up under the cover.


Paul.

Re: Early 360 machines (Was: Front panel switches - what did they do?)

[Chuck Guzis]

On 05/25/2016 07:22 PM, Paul Berger wrote:

> Speaking of dumps I remember an engineer friend telling me that at
> the university that he went to they had a CDC Cyber system and they 
> discovered that you could initiate a dump from any workstation, and
> the system would dump out to the printer and while it was dumping the
> whole system came to a halt guess what the students where fond
> of doing..  It would seem to me that something like that should
> have been more restricted.

At least in SCOPE and KRONOS, DMP was the command to dump memory--but if
initiated from a user's control point, it would dump only the user's FL,
not the whole system.  So the story seems to be a bit apocryphal to me.
  Most university systems charged not only by the CPU second, but also
by the number of lines printed and the number of cards punched.

--Chuck

Re: Early 360 machines (Was: Front panel switches - what did they do?)

[Paul Berger]

On 2016-05-25 10:43 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
The train printers did have an obvious advantage over both the drum 
and band printers. In our shop, we printed lots and lots of core 
dumps. Add to a full CM dump, a couple of million words of ECS and the 
"0" characters wore out pretty quickly. You could replace a train 
slug, but had to live with "fuzzy" zeroes until someone higher up 
couldn't stand the printout. I recall reading a set of pre-publication 
Univac 1108 manuals that were printed on a badly-adjusted drum 
printer. It gave me headaches. --Chuck 
Speaking of dumps I remember an engineer friend telling me that at the 
university that he went to they had a CDC Cyber system and they 
discovered that you could initiate a dump from any workstation, and the 
system would dump out to the printer and while it was dumping the whole 
system came to a halt guess what the students where fond of 
doing..  It would seem to me that something like that should have 
been more restricted.


In the first couple years of working as an electronic technician, we 
still had software people in the branch office, and I remember being 
blown away by this one guy.  He came into the office with a MVS dump 
which was a 6-8 inch stack of paper and on the top of each was a header 
with the IAR  and register contents when the system trapped. He looks at 
the IAR and digs into the dump to find that address and then he starts 
working backwards, unassembling the instructions in his head and after a 
few minutes he points to a spot in the dump and says "yes there it is, 
there is where it started to go wrong"


Paul.

Re: Early 360 machines (Was: Front panel switches - what did they do?)

[Chuck Guzis]

On 05/25/2016 06:16 PM, Paul Berger wrote:

> I only ever saw one of the drum style high speed printers and I think
> it was a Honeywell wavey line printer.  I remember the operator
> demoed it for us by printing a picture, if you printed a whole line
> of the same character it would fire every hammer at the same time, it
> was very noisey.  The 1403 limited the number of hammers that could
> fire simultaneously, for testing the CEs had what was called train
> breaker routine that would exercise the printer firing the maximum
> number repeatedly.

CDC printer ribbons came packaged with a set of disposable gloves.  Good
thing, that.

One of the problems with the 501 drum printer was that hammers could get
gummed up and slow down a bit.  The "wavy line" output was typical of
this.   (similar delays on train printers would result in a lateral
displacement of a character, which for some reason, wasn't nearly as
annoying.)  One bit of entertainment for the military visitors was
either "Anchors Aweigh" or "The Stars and Stripes Forever", played using
the 1604 speaker, tape drives, and the 501 as percussion.  The 501 had a
switch for high/low speed.  If set to "low", the output wasn't half bad.

The 501 would rattle like a machine gun, but the 512 train printer would
put out an ear-splitting scream if you left the sound cover up.

The train printers did have an obvious advantage over both the drum and
band printers.  In our shop, we printed lots and lots of core dumps.
Add to a full CM dump, a couple of million words of ECS and the "0"
characters wore out pretty quickly.  You could replace a train slug, but
had to live with "fuzzy" zeroes until someone higher up couldn't stand
the printout.

I recall reading a set of pre-publication Univac 1108 manuals that were
printed on a badly-adjusted drum printer.  It gave me headaches.

--Chuck

Re: Early 360 machines (Was: Front panel switches - what did they do?)

[Paul Berger]

On 2016-05-25 10:14 PM, Jon Elson wrote:

On 05/25/2016 05:31 PM, Noel Chiappa wrote:

 > From: Jon Elson

 >> I interned at IBM Bermuda, and they had a 360/20 as their 
main service

 >> bureau machine; it had (IIRC) ... a 4301 printer.

 > I'm guessing, maybe, that would be a 1403 printer?

Ah, right you are! The old grey cells are, well, old! ;-)

Those printers had an amazingly long life! They were first introduced 
in 1959
with the 1401 computer, and, like I said, the brand spanking new 
System 3

they got in ca. 1976 came with one! I wonder when IBM stopped producing
them?


I believe IBM recycled them from retired machines for an amazing 
length of time.  Certainly, a number of 1403s were in use on 370 and 
even later systems.  I was recently surprised while digging at 
bitsavers to find out how ancient the 2821 controller was - all SMS 
cards and some very ingenious magnetic transformer tricks to do the 
address selection of the core stack with as few transistors as 
possible.  (The 2821 was the controller for the card read/punch as 
well as the 1403 printer family.)


Jon
The 360/25 came with a built in attachment for a 1403 and the whole CPU 
was not much larger than a 2821.  When I first came to Halifax in 1979 
one of the banks was still running 360s in their paper processing 
center, they had a 22 and a 25, each one with a 1403 printer, 2501 card 
reader, 3411 tape drive, and a 1419 cheque sorter.  By that time all the 
other banks had 370 systems and 3890 cheque sorters, another long lived 
machine, announced in 1973 and still in use today.  The original 
machines had a 360 CPU bolted onto the end as a control unit.  One bank 
had a 370/115 CPU and when they got a 3890 they had to replace it with a 
faster CPU because the 3890 would overrun the channels.


Paul.

Re: Early 360 machines (Was: Front panel switches - what did they do?)

[Paul Berger]

On 2016-05-25 9:46 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:

On 05/25/2016 05:17 PM, Paul Berger wrote:


The train printers where amazing technology but what often killed
the trains was an operator who neglected to top off the oil
reservoir, if the train went dry they would literally screech to a
halt.   It was always interesting when someone put a carriage control
tape on backwards or didn't lower the brushes, the first skip would
empty the box and the paper would be all packed up under the cover.

The CE's nightmare for the 512 was a ribbon that started to disintegrate
and become lodged in the train.  As I've witnessed, it involves a
container of solvent and a brush and completely disassembly of the
train, scrubbing each type slug carefully, the putting the whole mess
back together.  Can you say "dirty filthy frustrating work?"

--Chuck

Yeah I watch some of the large system guys disassemble and repair trains 
and of course when you put them back together you had to make sure the 
slugs where all in the right order.   We had customers that would buy 
3rd party ribbons that where practically dripping with ink that would 
gum up everything in the machine.  The other problem we had with 3rd 
party ribbons on 3203 and 4245 was some would be too transparent and 
would mess up the tracking sensor so the ribbons would go off one side.


I only ever saw one of the drum style high speed printers and I think it 
was a Honeywell wavey line printer.  I remember the operator demoed it 
for us by printing a picture, if you printed a whole line of the same 
character it would fire every hammer at the same time, it was very 
noisey.  The 1403 limited the number of hammers that could fire 
simultaneously, for testing the CEs had what was called train breaker 
routine that would exercise the printer firing the maximum number 
repeatedly.


Paul.

Re: Early 360 machines (Was: Front panel switches - what did they do?)

[Jon Elson]

On 05/25/2016 05:31 PM, Noel Chiappa wrote:

 > From: Jon Elson

 >> I interned at IBM Bermuda, and they had a 360/20 as their main service
 >> bureau machine; it had (IIRC) ... a 4301 printer.

 > I'm guessing, maybe, that would be a 1403 printer?

Ah, right you are! The old grey cells are, well, old! ;-)

Those printers had an amazingly long life! They were first introduced in 1959
with the 1401 computer, and, like I said, the brand spanking new System 3
they got in ca. 1976 came with one! I wonder when IBM stopped producing
them?


I believe IBM recycled them from retired machines for an 
amazing length of time.  Certainly, a number of 1403s were 
in use on 370 and even later systems.  I was recently 
surprised while digging at bitsavers to find out how ancient 
the 2821 controller was - all SMS cards and some very 
ingenious magnetic transformer tricks to do the address 
selection of the core stack with as few transistors as 
possible.  (The 2821 was the controller for the card 
read/punch as well as the 1403 printer family.)


Jon

Re: Early 360 machines (Was: Front panel switches - what did they do?)

[Jon Elson]

On 05/25/2016 02:51 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:

I have a related question.  All of the S/260s that I've seen had 2400
series tape drives.  But my "green card" makes reference to 729 drives
as well.  Does anyone recall them being installed on a S/360 system?

--Chuck


Well, the early 2400 tape drives had a VERY simple 
interface.  The read amps delivered raw analog signals to 
the controller.  The write amps took 9 digital signals from 
the controller.  There were also forward, reverse, rewind, 
write gate and EOT/BOT sensors, and unit select.  VERY 
simple interface at the VERY lowest possible level.


I can easily imagine the 729 series of drives may have had a 
very similar interface.  So, it may be possible that these 
could be interchanged fairly easily.


Jon

Re: Early 360 machines (Was: Front panel switches - what did they do?)

[Chuck Guzis]

On 05/25/2016 05:17 PM, Paul Berger wrote:

> The train printers where amazing technology but what often killed
> the trains was an operator who neglected to top off the oil
> reservoir, if the train went dry they would literally screech to a
> halt.   It was always interesting when someone put a carriage control
> tape on backwards or didn't lower the brushes, the first skip would
> empty the box and the paper would be all packed up under the cover.

The CE's nightmare for the 512 was a ribbon that started to disintegrate
and become lodged in the train.  As I've witnessed, it involves a
container of solvent and a brush and completely disassembly of the
train, scrubbing each type slug carefully, the putting the whole mess
back together.  Can you say "dirty filthy frustrating work?"

--Chuck

Re: Early 360 machines (Was: Front panel switches - what did they do?)

[Paul Berger]

On 2016-05-25 8:48 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:

On 05/25/2016 03:31 PM, Noel Chiappa wrote:


Those printers had an amazingly long life! They were first introduced
in 1959 with the 1401 computer, and, like I said, the brand spanking
new System 3 they got in ca. 1976 came with one! I wonder when IBM
stopped producing them?

One of the lesser-known stories is that up until the 512 printer, CDC
offered drum printers (501 mostly) for high-speed printing.  They were
desperate to get a train printer on the market, but the prototypes would
not last more than a few minutes before the print train flew apart.

Somehow, they got hold of a 1403N1 and essentially took the print
mechanism to pieces to learn its secrets.  I don't know if the 1403 ever
worked right after that...

--Chuck

The train printers where amazing technology but what often killed the 
trains was an operator who neglected to top off the oil reservoir, if 
the train went dry they would literally screech to a halt.   It was 
always interesting when someone put a carriage control tape on backwards 
or didn't lower the brushes, the first skip would empty the box and the 
paper would be all packed up under the cover.


Paul.

Re: Early 360 machines (Was: Front panel switches - what did they do?)

[Paul Berger]

On 2016-05-25 8:47 PM, jwsmobile wrote:



On 5/25/2016 4:29 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:

On Wed, 25 May 2016, Noel Chiappa wrote:
Those printers had an amazingly long life! They were first 
introduced in 1959
with the 1401 computer, and, like I said, the brand spanking new 
System 3

they got in ca. 1976 came with one! I wonder when IBM stopped producing
them?


Did they discontinue the most long lasting printer that they had made
The 1403 was and is a great printer, but IBM didn't make a lot of 
crappy ones.  We had a 6262 and a 3xxx (don't recall it) with a 
builtin channel both of which were great printers too.  Don't forget 
such as the laser engine coupled units either.  Huge messes, but could 
turn out amazing volumes of printed material.
The 1403 was replaced by the 3203 which used the same print trains there 
was also a faster 3211 that used a different train.  Later there was the 
4245 band printer which was a 3203 with a different front gate and later 
the 6262 which was the last of the big impact printers. The 3211 was 
announced in 1970 which may have been the end of the 1403, but people 
where still using them long after that.  The 3203 was announced around 
1979 and had performance comparable to 1403 and used the same trains, 
but did not have as good of a stacker.


The 6262 had electronic hammer timing which took away one of the really 
tedious, not to mention deafening  jobs in these printers. On the 3203 
and 4245 each hammer had a set screw behind it that adjust the hammer 
flight timing and you would run a H pattern and look for columns that 
where off to one side adjust and run again and repeat until all 132 
columns where looking good.  On the 6262 there was a special setup tool 
that was put in front of the hammers and connected to the printer, and 
then you would run a test and it would electronically measure the timing 
of each hammer and adjust the firing time accordingly.


I liked the big 3800 duplex setup,  two 3800s where set up end to end 
with precise spacing between them the paper was fed through one one 3800 
and into the other with the paper being turned over between them.  The 
3800 printer also had burst and slit features available that the CEs 
called rip and tear feature.  Printing steadily a 3800 could empty a box 
of paper in four minutes and it would detect the end of the paper and 
stop before it fed all the way in and there was a fold down table with 
pins on it so the operator could align and join on the new box so they 
did not have to completely re-thread the paper.


Paul

Re: Early 360 machines (Was: Front panel switches - what did they do?)

[jwsmobile]

On 5/25/2016 4:29 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:

On Wed, 25 May 2016, Noel Chiappa wrote:
Those printers had an amazingly long life! They were first introduced 
in 1959
with the 1401 computer, and, like I said, the brand spanking new 
System 3

they got in ca. 1976 came with one! I wonder when IBM stopped producing
them?


Did they discontinue the most long lasting printer that they had made
The 1403 was and is a great printer, but IBM didn't make a lot of crappy 
ones.  We had a 6262 and a 3xxx (don't recall it) with a builtin channel 
both of which were great printers too.  Don't forget such as the laser 
engine coupled units either.  Huge messes, but could turn out amazing 
volumes of printed material.

Re: Early 360 machines (Was: Front panel switches - what did they do?)

[Chuck Guzis]

On 05/25/2016 03:31 PM, Noel Chiappa wrote:

> Those printers had an amazingly long life! They were first introduced
> in 1959 with the 1401 computer, and, like I said, the brand spanking
> new System 3 they got in ca. 1976 came with one! I wonder when IBM
> stopped producing them?

One of the lesser-known stories is that up until the 512 printer, CDC
offered drum printers (501 mostly) for high-speed printing.  They were
desperate to get a train printer on the market, but the prototypes would
not last more than a few minutes before the print train flew apart.

Somehow, they got hold of a 1403N1 and essentially took the print
mechanism to pieces to learn its secrets.  I don't know if the 1403 ever
worked right after that...

--Chuck

Re: Early 360 machines (Was: Front panel switches - what did they do?)

[Fred Cisin]

On Wed, 25 May 2016, Noel Chiappa wrote:

Those printers had an amazingly long life! They were first introduced in 1959
with the 1401 computer, and, like I said, the brand spanking new System 3
they got in ca. 1976 came with one! I wonder when IBM stopped producing
them?


Did they discontinue the most long lasting printer that they had made?

Re: Early 360 machines (Was: Front panel switches - what did they do?)

[Mike Ross]

On Thu, May 26, 2016 at 5:48 AM, William Donzelli  wrote:
>> I'm guessing, maybe, that would be a 1403 printer?  There were 1403 and 1443
>> printers.
>
> There was also a 1404 printer, but I do not think many places had them.
>
> Does anyone know what became of the two S/360 model 20 systems that
> came out of Sweden a year or two ago? They were fairly complete with
> MFCMs and tape units. My bid for one did not get accepted, and I do
> not know who the winner(s) were.

Well I know LCM has at least one working... and if there was any
bidding involved they would have won by definition! But I don't know
if that's where they got it or not.

I hadn't heard about these machines; I would have been interested of course.

http://www.corestore.org
'No greater love hath a man than he lay down his life for his brother.
Not for millions, not for glory, not for fame.
For one person, in the dark, where no one will ever know or see.'

Re: Early 360 machines (Was: Front panel switches - what did they do?)

[Noel Chiappa]

> From: Jon Elson

>> I interned at IBM Bermuda, and they had a 360/20 as their main service
>> bureau machine; it had (IIRC) ... a 4301 printer.

> I'm guessing, maybe, that would be a 1403 printer? 

Ah, right you are! The old grey cells are, well, old! ;-)

Those printers had an amazingly long life! They were first introduced in 1959
with the 1401 computer, and, like I said, the brand spanking new System 3
they got in ca. 1976 came with one! I wonder when IBM stopped producing
them?

Noel

Re: Early 360 machines (Was: Front panel switches - what did they do?)

[jwsmobile]

On 5/25/2016 12:51 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:

I have a related question.  All of the S/260s that I've seen had 2400
series tape drives.  But my "green card" makes reference to 729 drives
as well.  Does anyone recall them being installed on a S/360 system?

--Chuck
Our 360/50 had 2400 drives.  Read both 7 and 9 track on one.  I think 
the subsystem was structured similar to the 3400 which had a controller 
box that powered and ran the drives.  I'm not sure what the 2400 system 
number was, but the 3400 series was a 3803, I think with the power 
supply and channel, etc.


thanks
Jim

Re: Early 360 machines (Was: Front panel switches - what did they do?)

[Chuck Guzis]

I have a related question.  All of the S/260s that I've seen had 2400
series tape drives.  But my "green card" makes reference to 729 drives
as well.  Does anyone recall them being installed on a S/360 system?

--Chuck

Re: Early 360 machines (Was: Front panel switches - what did they do?)

[William Donzelli]

> I'm guessing, maybe, that would be a 1403 printer?  There were 1403 and 1443
> printers.

There was also a 1404 printer, but I do not think many places had them.

Does anyone know what became of the two S/360 model 20 systems that
came out of Sweden a year or two ago? They were fairly complete with
MFCMs and tape units. My bid for one did not get accepted, and I do
not know who the winner(s) were.

--
Will

Re: Early 360 machines (Was: Front panel switches - what did they do?)

[Jon Elson]

On 05/25/2016 12:11 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:

On 05/25/2016 10:06 AM, Jon Elson wrote:


The only language supported on the 360/20 was RPG.  For a mostly tab
card type of operation, you could actually do a lot in RPG.
Otherwise, you had to write in machine language and get it assembled
on another system.

My recollection was that there was a native assembler for the 20; it did
not, IIRC, include such goodies as macros, but was sufficient to write
small programs.

OK, makes sense, but I didn't find any doc about it when I 
did some searching a while ago.


Jon

Re: Early 360 machines (Was: Front panel switches - what did they do?)

[Paul Berger]

On 2016-05-25 2:06 PM, Jon Elson wrote:

On 05/25/2016 12:01 PM, Noel Chiappa wrote:

 > From: Jon Elson

 > the /20 was intended for very specific uses in 360 shops, and 
maybe as
 > an entry-level "foot in the door" to move totally tab card 
shops into
 > the 360 family. The only /20s I ever saw were used as offline 
spool

 > printers and card readers in large 360 shops.

I interned at IBM Bermuda, and they had a 360/20 as their main 
service bureau

machine; it had (IIRC) a card reader/punch, 4 tape drives, and a 4301
printer. When I got there, they had just gotten in a System 3 (two
single-platter hard drives, a 4301 printer, and I'm not sure what 
else) to

replace it.


I'm guessing, maybe, that would be a 1403 printer?  There were 1403 
and 1443 printers.


The only language supported on the 360/20 was RPG.  For a mostly tab 
card type of operation, you could actually do a lot in RPG. Otherwise, 
you had to write in machine language and get it assembled on another 
system.


Jon
RPG was also a very popular  language on S/3, S/32, S/34, S/36, S/38 and 
AS/400 however as time went by it changed a lot and I am told the RPG on 
the AS/400 bears little resemblance to the original.  The closest I even 
got to RPG was when writing code for S/36 we needed a test file and 
looked at DFU as a means of creating one, we scrapped that idea when we 
found we needed to use RPG specs to describe the file, and modified a 
COBOL program one of my coworkers had to create the file.


Paul.

Re: Early 360 machines (Was: Front panel switches - what did they do?)

[Nico de Jong]

>
> The only language supported on the 360/20 was RPG.  For a mostly tab card 
> type of operation, you could actually do a lot in RPG. Otherwise, you had 
> to write in machine language and get it assembled on another system.

I never used a /20, but I did a lot RPG/II on a model /40. It is in fact one 
of my favourites...
(I can hear people laughing!). For a customer, I wrote a RPG interpretor, so 
he could use the in-house RPG expertise to set up validation routines for 
the data coming into the shop. The interpretor was written in Turbo Pascal 
for Windows 1.50. The output was a DLL, which was then used in a nice media 
conversion program (InterMedia)
/Nico 

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Re: Early 360 machines (Was: Front panel switches - what did they do?)

[Chuck Guzis]

On 05/25/2016 10:06 AM, Jon Elson wrote:

> The only language supported on the 360/20 was RPG.  For a mostly tab 
> card type of operation, you could actually do a lot in RPG.
> Otherwise, you had to write in machine language and get it assembled
> on another system.

My recollection was that there was a native assembler for the 20; it did
not, IIRC, include such goodies as macros, but was sufficient to write
small programs.

--Chuck

Re: Early 360 machines (Was: Front panel switches - what did they do?)

[Jon Elson]

On 05/25/2016 12:01 PM, Noel Chiappa wrote:

 > From: Jon Elson

 > the /20 was intended for very specific uses in 360 shops, and maybe as
 > an entry-level "foot in the door" to move totally tab card shops into
 > the 360 family. The only /20s I ever saw were used as offline spool
 > printers and card readers in large 360 shops.

I interned at IBM Bermuda, and they had a 360/20 as their main service bureau
machine; it had (IIRC) a card reader/punch, 4 tape drives, and a 4301
printer. When I got there, they had just gotten in a System 3 (two
single-platter hard drives, a 4301 printer, and I'm not sure what else) to
replace it.


I'm guessing, maybe, that would be a 1403 printer?  There 
were 1403 and 1443 printers.


The only language supported on the 360/20 was RPG.  For a 
mostly tab card type of operation, you could actually do a 
lot in RPG. Otherwise, you had to write in machine language 
and get it assembled on another system.


Jon

Early 360 machines (Was: Front panel switches - what did they do?)

[Noel Chiappa]

> From: Jon Elson

> the /20 was intended for very specific uses in 360 shops, and maybe as
> an entry-level "foot in the door" to move totally tab card shops into
> the 360 family. The only /20s I ever saw were used as offline spool
> printers and card readers in large 360 shops.

I interned at IBM Bermuda, and they had a 360/20 as their main service bureau
machine; it had (IIRC) a card reader/punch, 4 tape drives, and a 4301
printer. When I got there, they had just gotten in a System 3 (two
single-platter hard drives, a 4301 printer, and I'm not sure what else) to
replace it.

Noel