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Written by special contributor Jeffrey Boulier on 2003-03-12 04:44:01
| Some users swear by Aqua interface of MacOS X, others proclaim the desktop-readiness of Linux, the polished presence of Windows XP, or expound upon the stately Solaris as the ultimate operating system. All of these users are wimps. Back in the old days, programmers toggled in boot code on front-panel switches, submitted jobs through JCL, and counted on a 24 hour operations staff to feed in the tapes for massive 5Mb datasets of accounting information. Portability was a pipe-dream, and computer time was far more valuable than that of the lowly programmer. Many of these operating systems and their descendents are still around. IBM's phenomenally successful OS/360 is now the 64-bit z/OS, and still provides IBM with billions of dollars in yearly revenue. |
Yes - I've keyed in the operating system, on a front panel just like the one above. And I wrote what I was keying in, in machine code, in 'C', or instruction by instruction, depending.
DEC PDP-8e
