IBM's 'dinosaur' turns 40

San Francisco Chronicle | April 5, 2004 | Benjamin Pimentel

[NCjim]

Known as drab-looking machines that sit in huge air-conditioned rooms, the IBM mainframe computer has been called the dinosaur of the technology world.

About a decade ago, pundits predicted it would soon become extinct.

But the machine, which companies all over the world have used to manage payroll and monitor expense accounts, and which enabled scientists to send the first men to the moon, is celebrating its 40th birthday this week.

[TC Rider]

My first experience with a mainframe was a Honeywell too! MULTICS operating system. Circa 1980.

But, did you ever try kurling with disc packs?

[TechJunkYard]

Also tended to occasionally dump vacuum in the tape columns...

The big 3203s used to do this too, occasionally, and the tape operators went bonkers trying to rewind the reels by hand. I learned to unreel enough tape back into the vacuum columns, and with a light touch on the Start and Stop buttons, start the vacuum back up so the tape drive would rewind it all by itself. I learned that trick from our friendly neighborhood CE who used to PM the drives every couple of months (because our old tapes were a bit dusty).

The tape operators had a nasty habit of putting those plastic write-enable rings in all of the reels, and ended up erasing my permanent history tapes on "scratch day". I tried to hide the rings, wrote "NO RING" on the bottom of all of my reels with magic marker, tried to make it impossible for them to put the rings back in, all to no avail.

But when the 3400 tape cartridges came out, they had a little thumb wheel for the write-enable deal... you'd turn the wheel so the white dot was showing and the drive would not write on the tape. Then, just a couple of drops of super glue on it and that thumb wheel would never move again. Wonderful. Then one of the tape ops actually destroyed one of my history carts with a screwdriver trying to get that thumb wheel back to erase mode.

[NCjim]

I'm just 55 - I started when I was 19 or 20, working at the computing center at NCSU where we had a 360/40 with a TP link to the 360/75 at TUCC. The major bottleneck in those days was the wait for a keypunch machine. I spent many a night there as the turnaround was much better after midnight!

[NCjim]

I should have said IBM's first true multi-tasking machines. And you are of course correct that they were also IBM's first general purpose computers.

[NCjim]

We had a CE who used to keep his lunch warm inside the 370/155, until one day when gravy seeped through the bag and ran down into the circuitry, shorting out a few critical components...

[NCjim]

Remember the high-quality pieces of lint-free cloth that were used with that stuff?

[bmwcyle]

UYK-7 memory on my AN/BQQ-5 IBM built submarine sonar system.

[wouldilie]

I still clean my glass with lint free cloth from STC. Sure don't miss changing capstan, rollers and vacumn sensors. Or for that matter clearing card jams and folding paper tape.

Anybody remember DECtape? Almost as good as duct tape.

[BabsC]

Anyone else remember playng tunes on the 1403 printers?

Or using the RTC punch cards in a job deck to load/unload mag tapes and open and close the impact printer.

Personally got caught playing orchestra with the hardware, fortunately it was entertaining to the HR guy so I just got applauded.(knew better than to get caught again)

[NCjim]

I remember how it would spew paper like a fountain

If the output included data that would skip to a channel on the carriage tape that had no punch, the paper would skip until the operator hit Carriage Stop or the box of paper emptied onto the floor behind the printer. Any operator worth his or her salt would put a punch in every column to prevent this headache.

[r9etb]

Those bad old dinosaurs are sure hard to extinct-i-ficate!

Well, they're difficult to extinctificate, because there are still a lot of things they can do better than other systems....

[NCjim]

Never trust a computer you can lift... :-)

[DuncanWaring]

5 wires? I remember it being "three". Two address wires and a "sense" wire or "write" wire or some such thing.

[js1138]

Remember when memory was called "core"?

What do you mean "called". I've repaired core memory.

[dirtboy]

I'll see ypur 3033 and raise you a Sperry 1100/40 and a DEC PDP floor...

I raise you a VAX 750 with a DEC Rainbow thrown in for fun. I actually helped a guy jump start a VAX once.

[mdmathis6]

What was the printer model whose cover would periodically raise up?

The "Janet" superbowl 34 special!

[Dr._Joseph_Warren]

Punch Cards!!!!

Ahhhh.... the memories.

Offering up a stack of cards to the mainframe gods in hopes they would look kindly upon your program.

Peering through the glass windows as the high priests worked their black magic in the air conditioned comfort of their raised floor alters.

Waiting for hours to see if your program ran successfully or fell victim to a typo or a card out of place.

[freepy smurf]

My dad ran a shop with a 3090 and 68 spools of DASD and I was there the day the "chiller" sprang a leak. It ran through a hole in the floor and peed all over a VAX (DEC-sh*t). I think he was actually proud of it.

[af_vet_rr]

Waiting for hours to see if your program ran successfully or fell victim to a typo or a card out of place.

I came into computers not too long after punch cards were on their way out, but I heard a lot of stories about near-nervous breakdowns happening from simple little mistakes.

[capitan_refugio]

I'm in southern California. It never gets icy here, except up on the mountains. But we did have our office variation on "Bowling for Dollars!" Except by then, it was the in-house Perkin-Elmer that got abused.