I see the staff overseeing these computers haven't changed a bit.
Posted on 04/11/2014 2:02:45 PM PDT by AngelesCrestHighway
The IBM mainframe, the drab-looking refrigerator-size machine that was once the symbol of computer technology, turned 50 this week. It’s been portrayed as a technology dinosaur, out of place in an era where computing is about being small, fast and mobile. But in half a century, the mainframe has remained one of IBM’s IBM-0.02% most successful flagship products. In fact, a decade ago when the mainframe celebrated its 40th year, Big Blue even embraced the ‘dinosaur’ label, unveiling the latest version with a catchy, defiant code name: ‘T-Rex.’
(Excerpt) Read more at marketwatch.com ...
My first job in IT was as an operator on a IBM VSE system back in the late 80s. Punch cards & reel to reels, dumb terminals... fun stuff.
That should be 160,000 not 160K. 7080 was a 8-bit byte machine before IBM introduced their 16-bit byte sexadecimal machines -- which IBM called hexadecimal.
Western civilization runs on MVS.
And the brutish 1419 MICR reader/sorter for those in bank DP. Goodness but I had a love/hate relationship with those suckers.
I see the staff overseeing these computers haven't changed a bit.
Those dates were Julian so they could be used mathematically. Somebody encouraged me to get on the y2k Cobol bandwagon but I didn't want the repsonnsibility if I got an airline app, etc.
I guess I don't miss it either. I'm not that brilliant and had to struggle, was always tense that something would happen I couldn't figure out. I did like the mental challenge sometimes though. I did solve some hard problems sometimes.
>>Hey! I was an AS/400 SME. Lay off the old girl. She did everything well.<<
IBM marketed the AS/400 as a departmental computer that can e run by the average secretary.
I assume you were not an average secretary? ;)
OS/400 was part of SAA until it wasn’t... ;);)
A dept secretary who could code in RPG. What a nightmare.
My previous job was converting a client-server system back to mainframe COBOL/CICS/IDMS for a recognizable jean company. That was 1998.
I code Groovy/Grails apps now but I still have to maintain C and COBOL programs.
Kinda miss some of it but time moves on.
So it was you that caused the y2k bug! : )
You were in a hurry and decided to leave off the 2 digits....
Geeezz, there were IBM machines before the 360. I was 19 when I cut my teeth on the IBM 650 with a RAMAC (very large disk drive with 3 moving arms) that would almost walk across the floor when it was sorting. Wrote code in SOAP.
And after that were the very popular 1401 and 1440 on which we wrote Autocoder. The banking industry loved those machines!! Well, back in the 60s that is. It was kinda fun to literally know how the insides of a machine worked in order to write code. Moved on to the GE 635 and COBOL and left the IBM stuff behind.
No not the average secretary. I was on the product team that worked on putting a wintel server in the 400. We ran our financials and inventory management system off of them. Later on we used the RS6000 as our logistics platform and passed data to the 400.
Actually easy for a secretary to run providing all she did was print reporrts and add users. I managed close to 100 of them over a global network so it was a tad more complicated.
I miss the good ole days of LU 6.2 and 5250 emulation. Running everything off of twinax and later on token ring.
Realistically, all those systems were outmoded well before y2k but I guess they didn't have the foresight to write a routine to span the two centuries just as a matter of prodence. New systems evolved from the old so some code just got copied and expanded.
Sometimes I was in a hurry though to get out of there; you are right about that.
So much I have forgotten. Some I want to forget. I miss my Hollerith code then. And I liked to do my own keypunching from the code sheets because I could unwind a little . . .
Reminds me of how Ross Perot brilliantly LEASED surplus IBM mainframe time at a discount to make BILLIONS processing Medicare payments for Uncle Sam, and sold the company for $2.4 billion. IBM thought he was nuts (just as they could have bought Microsoft for a song).
NASA acquired at least a dozen different systems over the years ,, all sorts of hardware and os’s ... the last contact I had with them in the mid 1990’s they were finally getting rid of 40 year old hardware and putting all the legacy systems on a IBM 3090 running CMS/VM with each one being it’s own virtual machine ... The systems still cannot talk to each other but at least the hardware stays up.
“JES2, JCL, TOS, ISPF, Hex Dumps”
The ones with the pedal digit?
And LOTS of rubber bands... It only took 1 dropped card deck to realize you NEVER walk across the room without the deck being rubber-banded!
Mark
I had completely forgotten that term! I did a "floor sort" once. From that time on, I had to be sure I had all the rubber bands out of my pockets before I washed my pants! Never moved another deck unless it was rubber-banded!
Mark
I have to correct my errors.. the 7080 was a 6-bit byte (ASCII) machine. Later IBM introduced their 8-bit byte sexadecimal machines (IBM used the word hexidecimal). IIRC each version contained an extra bit called a parity bit.
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