The Hobbit Hole XXXIV - But better than rain or rippling streams...

[RosieCotton]

Hey...cool post number!

[Rose in RoseBear]

I took computer programming using a hollerith card punching machine to write our programs.

So did I! In fact, I had to drop COBOL the first time around .. it was a one-credit hour course, and I didn't have time that semester to devote hours and hours of real-time to typing out COBOL cards one at a time.

By the time I retook the course, Trinity had implemented a system that let us sit at workstations and key in card images, which we could then send to an automated punch in the computer room. The operators would punch the cards, which we would then submit, sometimes as we stood there at the window.

In my first programming job we still used card punchers for the OS/MVT JCL cards.

All through college, we budding computer scientists (we were often reminded that we were not "merely" programmers) were told that we would never see JCL. In fact, Trinity only offered a one-hour JCL course in even-year spring semesters; in 1980, they cancelled the course, even though twenty-some-odd students signed up for it.

The first weekend of my first job, what was I doing? Why, modifying all the JCL in the shop in preparation for a disk drive upgrade, of course!

We also had to ask the operators not to submit a job with a sort in it until no other sorts were being run, since there was only 1 sort partition, and if 2 sorts were run at the same time, both jobs would fail.

I can remember flirting with the operators to get them to change the print train in the line printers so that I could print my stories in upper- and lowercase ...

[300winmag]

First question: what saved them from a building collapse? Second question: what kind of printer did they use for the vellum?

Question one: the punch cards were eventually transferred to tape, and later disks. The system was a 1401 assembler port of a hard-wired IBM 407 accounting machine app. In turn the 1401 emulator was run under VM370 as a virtual machine.

Actually, the operators loved it, because each one could have his "own" 1401 with card reader, printer, punch, and virtual console. The original app dated from the mid-1950s.

In truth, the City-County building was condemned as unsafe from the day it opened in 1949. It was built by the mayor's brother. It took a year of reinforcement before anybody was allowed above the first floor. With 18 million punch cards on the 11th floor, you could feel the floor wobble whenever someone walked by. Our office was on the opposite side of the building, and I never went near the assessor's office again. It was only by some miracle that half the building didn't collapse. Elimination of the punch cards saved it.

Second question: the forms were printed on a IBM 1403N1 chain printer. It was probably the fastest, neatest, and noisiest mechanical printer ever made. This was in pre-laser days.

[300winmag]

The first weekend of my first job, what was I doing? Why, modifying all the JCL in the shop in preparation for a disk drive upgrade, of course!

I was half-watching something on TV, where they used some stock 1980s footage of computer room operations. Something seemed vaguely familiar, and I realized I was reading the main MVS operator's console. I was watching the job starts, stops, tape mounts, start and end of printing, etc. I wasn't paying attention, it just activated some part of my brain.

Another time, I had something on the History Channel running while I was sitting here freeping. I realized I was listening to, and understanding, the soundtrack of a German newsreel. My German is exceedingly rusty, but newsreel scripts, like Church Latin, were written in basic, easy-to-understand forms.

I have problems with suspension-of-disbelief when watching movies, and there are are these technical gaffes with weapons, or poor special effects, that immediate catch my attention, even though I want to watch the movie and enjoy myself. I didn't have any problems like that with the LOTR movies, because no gross blooper made it to the screen.

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

It was probably the fastest, neatest, and noisiest mechanical printer ever made

I could always hear the high-speed printer chattering in the background. If it stopped for more than a minute it usually meant that the system had crashed (again). Also remember working on a VM370 machine, with my virtual card reader and virtual card punch. You would send someone a message by 'punching' it out to his account, and receive one by activating your 'reader'.

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

no gross blooper made it to the screen.

If you don't count that VW 'bug' in the shire, of course.

[Corin Stormhands]

If you don't count that VW 'bug' in the shire, of course.

Well, that and Elrond's blatant irregularity.

[RosieCotton]

And the elves showing up at Helm’s Deep.

[300winmag]

Tonight's Saturday night gun pron was inspired by an offline discussion about assembly problems with the HK91/G3 bolt. What seems like a simple process sometimes isn't. It's a case of knowing what's wrong, but not being able to figure a way around it. Here's the weapon in question:

The Norwegian military seems to have the clearest instructions.

Steps 3,4, and 5 are the tricky part. The bolt head is small, slippery, and has to fight a heavy spring on a latch.

This is the culprit. The spring is under the right of the bar, and the latch that controls the bolt head is on the left.

When you "jab" the bolt head down (it tried to jab me back, so I used a plastic no-bounce hammer), you get the latch at the lowest point of the bolt, and the work is all uphill after that. You have to magically pull the bolt head forward, and twist it so the latch moves off the flat, and onto the highest part of the rear edge. All against considerable spring pressure.

I got lucky once, and was able to use a fingertip to press down on the spring-end of the latch, easing the pressure enough to allow everything to work. It pretty much mashed my fingertip, too. Every other approach was pretty difficult, too.

Finally, I just wrapped the bolt head with rag, and tried some pliers. With some decent leverage, the spring pressure seemed trivial, and I didn't have to clamp on to the bolt head with a death grip. It worked easily, and nothing was harmed, especially myself.

This was done to help out another H&K owner. For myself, I bought this genuine H&K tool. It's extremely rare because it was intended for depot-level maintenance. It should have been standard issue, at least to the squad level. It's a simple aluminum tool with some cuts to hold the bolt carrier, and a tapped hole where a thumbscrew is turned down to press down on the right side of the latch.

You relieve as much spring pressure as you want. You can then turn and twist and slide the bolt head to wherever it needs to be, and then back off the screw.

My instincts told me to buy the tool, even though it cost $50, ages ago. It has more than paid for itself. It's a damn shame they never made many, and these tools are now impossible to find.

What was Heckler & Koch thinking? It's the only non-trivial part of field maintenance on these weapons.

[Rose in RoseBear]

<smile> When I took computer graphics, we were using a Tektronix workstation. We were told that the optical gun behind the glass was pushing against the inside of the glass at some pressure. The professor warned us that, should we ever notice the screen cracking, to immediately get out of the way, lest we be impaled by the projectile gun as it exploded out of the screen ...

I suggested we send special monitors with flawed screens to the Soviet Union ...

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

Elrond's blatant irregularity.

He did run a little 'hot and cold' didn't he.

[300winmag]

Also remember working on a VM370 machine, with my virtual card reader and virtual card punch. You would send someone a message by 'punching' it out to his account, and receive one by activating your 'reader'.

Later versions had the VM equivalent of instant messaging, email, remote operations, and "tunneling" through from one physical system to another. It was an open-source operating system (thank God), and there were all sorts of neat, unsupported extensions that people had written. One company even wrote a version that ran as a single image on multiple physical computers. By sharing paging, disk, and I/O channels, your virtual machine could bounce around seamlessly between different physical computers.

Aside from the pressure of running the first commercial copy of VM370 on the planet, I had lots of fun with it. Almost never had to do "nights and weekends" after that. VM was good for testing out a new version of itself under itself during regular business hours. I talked to someone who once ran multiple levels of VM-under-VM as a stunt. He said he quit at five levels because the system was starting to slow down, and he was having a hard time remembering at what level he was working.

[Rose in RoseBear]

the multimillion dollar S360/50

I believe that this isn't as powerful as the smallest palm held computer these days.

Caption: "This is what a big 360 computer room looked like. In the front is the CPU (this looks like a Model 50, but they all looked pretty much alike, just that the bigger, more expensive models had more dials and switches on the front) and operator console, with selectric typewriter. Just over the operator's head is a bank of 2311 disk drives. This bank of 6 disk drives would have held almost 50 million bytes of information on-line at once. This was mind-blowing back 30 years ago! Behind the CPU you can see the tape drives. In those days, the system would have still had a card read-punch (probably a model 2540), but I don't see it in this picture. Far in the background are other computers, storage, and control units."

Brings back memories, don't it?

[Rose in RoseBear]

What's a railroad pen, precious?

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

50 Megabytes! It woud take a cable modem about 5 seconds to download all of it!!

[300winmag]

Brings back memories, don't it?

It sure does. Somewhere I have some scanned slides I took as our IBM rep, SE, and CE were installing the new S370/145 that (unknown to me at the time) would be running the first customer copy of VM370.

I had heard about the operating system, and was familiar with its parent, CP67, used at the University of Michigan on a S360/67 (a semi-custom machine originally called the 66M). I was interested in trying it out.

My introduction to it was a bit abrupt and unplanned. Just before quitting time on a Friday, the SE came by with a box of tapes, and a couple of pieces of paper. "Here's VM370. It's so new, there are no manuals out for it yet, just a few notes. I'm going on vacation for two weeks, but I got you four hours of machine time every night, starting right now. Let me know how it turns out."

[300winmag]

I got this in an email from a buddy:

A Japanese doctor says, "Medicine in my country is so advanced that we can take a kidney out of one man, put it in another, and have him out looking for work in six weeks."

A German doctor says, "That is nothing. We can take a lung out of one person, put it in another, and have him out looking for work in four weeks."

A British doctor says, "In my country medicine is so advanced that we can take half a heart out of one person, put it in another, and have both of them out looking for work in two weeks."

The Canadian doctor, not to be outdone, interjected, "You guys are way behind. We took a woman with no brains, sent her to Michigan where she became Governor, and now half the state is out looking for work."

[Rose in RoseBear]

Hey, Li'l! I'm fine ... this job thing is taking a lot of my time, but I'm having a blast and learning oodles of stuff. Heretofore, I've always approached problems programmatically --- that is, I would try to write a program to solve any given problem. I'm learning that, with SQL, there's usually a query-based solution. It's turning my head around!

Oh, I'm working on this journal-based backstory. I don't know how well I'll do with NaNo if I'm still at this job, but I will give NaNo whatever I have left over.

I'm planning on writing the first story of the journal series. It's 1996, the height of the dot.com boom, and a dot-com Austin businessman has a series of exceptionally strange encounters in a very short time. Someone tries to kill him, someone jacks with his business; he is saved by a strange man who says he can find the businessman's long-lost half-sister ...

[Rose in RoseBear]

If your setting is in the South ...

But my setting isn't the South ... it's Texas!

<laughing as I make myself scarce, lest the Corin angel come after me ...>

[Rose in RoseBear]

From a financial POV, your characters would have found the most security in investing in the infrastructure of the North. The foundaries, the railways, the factories, the trade routes, etc.

Oh, yes, indeed, they did that very thing ... as best they could. The books (volumes) disappeared, and the only person who listened had to rely on her memory of how things should be.