IBM's 'dinosaur' turns 40

San Francisco Chronicle | April 5, 2004 | Benjamin Pimentel

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

I installed one of the very early 3033's (I think it was serial number 13, could not close the doors on the outboard channels, so many of those yellow wires...customer bought it to run VM and multiple copies of MVT... Poughkeepsie wanted us to bludgeon them into running MVS.... What Turmoil...

[Fledermaus]

I know a hotel that keeps it's old IBM-36 mainframe alive (they had to replace the fans recently because they would stop the 40 minute boot process by shutting down) to read the data on the old 8" floppy disc packs they used to download "guest history".

Why anyone would still want a copy of their hotel bill from 1998 (when the machine was replaced with an AS-400) and before is beyond me.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

PDP's are the first DEC machine, the first Mini-Computer...

[capitan_refugio]

To be sure, "Freon" is a whole group of Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Tri-chloro-tri-fluoro-ethane is Freon 113. IIRC the stuff used in auto air conditioners was the refrigerant Freon 12.

We just used q-tips and rubbing alcohol, and then blew on them!

[Nick Danger]

Anyone else remember playng tunes on the 1403 printers?

Raindrops keep falling on my head

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

1965 is when I joined .... worked with the RS 6000 when it was introduced....an amazing machine.....still preferred 360/370/3090 with MVS ...VM ...

[pt17]

As I remember, forty years ago it was the 1401. Thirty five years ago was the 1410. Thirty years ago the 365 was going and the 370 was coming

My own remembrances were, in computer room chronology: 650, RCA 501, 1401, RCA Spectra 70, 1410, 360, 370. It was into minis and PCs after that. It's funny how some PC server rooms have grown up to look like the mainframe rooms of old, complete with raised floor, viewing windows, UPS, frigid air and all.

[wideminded]

The System/360 was introduced April 7, 1964.

A long time ago I worked for a brilliant guy who had been involved in the design of the 360. He told us that the pressure was so intense to get the 360 out that two people committed suicide.

[Ichneumon]

Remember when memory was called "core"?

I remember when it *was* core...

[Ichneumon]

How about tape drives running away. Can't remember the model

Someone developed a novelty program for one of the big "washing machine" disk drive units which would work the read/write heads in just the right rhythm to "walk" the unit around the floor from the vibration.

[Ichneumon]

I had to do a Y2K conversion on my own code! It took five years of background work (~a million lines of Cobol), but who knew a software project started in 1982 would see the turn of the century?

You're not the only one...

I was original designer and coder on an application that I started in 1982 as well, and it's still going strong. A new update will be released next week or so, with a new state-of-the-art user interface. A lot of the "engine" is still the original stuff, although it was auto-converted from original FORTRAN to "C" in the early 90's, and recompiled as C++ (with suitable cleanup) last year. And it was originally a mainframe application, but now of course runs on PCs under Windows.

[Ichneumon]

Anyway, thanks for jogging the memory. Was "hand programming" the standard way to start up back then?

For a while, yeah. Some of our operators did it often enough that they had the whole sequence memorized and didn't need to read it off a cheat sheet.

What is the equivalent between what we did then (hand program, tape read) to what happens today when we turn on our computers?

Now it's all read out of system ROM (read-only memory) which has the boot sequence permanently stored in it, and the CPU chip is built so it knows to look in a particular memory location when it's first turned on an start executing whatever it finds there. So the on-CPU "wake-up" instructions are equivalent to your hand-coded instructions, and the contents of the ROM are equivalent to your old paper tape.

Computer trivia: Starting up a computer is called "booting" the computer because in the old days the sequence of hand-coding the start-up program was called "bootstrapping". It was called this because getting the operating system off the ground and flying was similar to the phrase about "lifting yourself up by your own bootstraps" (which was itself inspired by the humorous image of trying to leave the ground by pulling hard upwards on your own shoelaces or "boot straps").

The computers then (and in a similar but internal sequence now) had to "lift themselves up by their own bootstraps" by manually loading a handful of instructions into them by hand, which gave them just enough information to know to (and how to) read what was on the pre-programmed paper tape, which then gave the computer just enough smarts to know how to find the disk drive (or magnetic tape) from which it would load the device drivers which would then allow it to load the operating system which would then allow it to start doing something resembling actual work.

Even today computers go through the same sort of "bootstrapping" themselves up into full competence when first powered on, but it's a lot more invisible because it's all done automatically. And it's still called "booting". :-)

[HAL9000]

Anyone else remember playng tunes on the 1403 printers?

I remember how it would spew paper like a fountain if the carriage tape loop came unglued. But otherwise, it was an excellent machine, built like a tank.

The other day, I found an old "green card" from my days as an IBM 360/370 assembly language programmer. It was a fine computer, except that it didn't have a hardware stack.

[HAL9000]

Computer trivia: Starting up a computer is called "booting" the computer because in the old days the sequence of hand-coding the start-up program was called "bootstrapping".

We called it Initial Program Load (IPL) back then. Or, as a verb, "IPL-ing the machine".

[Bad Dog2]

Yes,

Especially coupling counters (don't forget your carry-back wire) and multiple x and digit selection. Also the joy of summary punching.

[Boot Hill]

If that computer doesn't use electron tubes, it has no claim to being anything close to a dinosaur!

--Boot Hill

[Bad Dog2]

I do believe it was: tricloroflouroetheylene. We had had a 370-165 and a 168 running in tandem through a specially built IBM blackbox also a 370-175 that had 3 1/2 inch water cooling pipes, 5 1403 Nancy 1s, and I can't remember how many tapes and discs, 70,000 reels in the library. Do remember, OS/MVS, JES2, HASP and TSO. This was in '74 - '75
About the only console command I can remember is F 00E,,B (Modify printer 00E to output class B), also was it Control, Reset, IMPL to reboot?

[Bad Dog2]

Yes,

Especially coupling counters (don't forget your carry-back wire) and multiple x and digit selection. Also the joy of summary punching.

[Socratic]

"If I came along 3 years later, my life would likely have been different."

How I relate to that! I was SO prepared to love computers but was so put off by the hassles, that I migrated elsewhere.

[Vermonter]

I'd forgotten about that. Also, when the tape got worn and the hole punches tore it would do that