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.

[NCjim]

And many a disk pack was lost after 'temporarily' placing it on top of the N1 just before it ran out of paper...

[Vermonter]

" draw Edith and a few others... :-)"

And do you remember DEBE ? I met her on a 1401

[sinkspur]

Remember when memory was called "core"?

[NCjim]

Yes - the original utility that 'does everything but eat'

[Vermonter]

That's her.

I am also intimately familiar with the N1 removing anything placed on top of it as well as wiring boards (still have a hand wrap tool).

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

[NCjim]

We used to use the accumulators in the 407 to punch sequence numbers in columns 73-80 on the 514... 'real programming'

[al baby]

[Socratic]

"...worked with the beast for over 35 years!"

Congrats! You're better than I am. As a college student, I thought that I would like computer class because of my love of science, but I loathed it! IBM punch cards, debugging, waiting for hours to have one's job run, it was awful. Just 4 or 5 years later, Bowling Green had PC's on campus and what a difference that was. Unfortunately I was no longer a full-time student.

[txhurl]

We used to have these disk drives we called Maytags- because they shook like one on reads. Same size, too.

[NCjim]

2401s were the high-speed rewind models - big trouble when a reel came off the spindle during rewind. Also tended to occasionally dump vacuum in the tape columns which were used not only for normal forward/backward operations but also by medium-speed forward and backward spacing for tape-marks.

[txhurl]

Tri-etho-tri-chlorine, or some such, that we swabbed the tape drive heads with.

Man, and I'm only 37. But I've done big machines since I was 19.

[NCjim]

That would have to be the 1311/2311 - you could literally walk one across the floor. They also tended to leak hydraulic oil and required periodic refilling during 'PM'.

[Vermonter]

When I first encountered the 370, it was used as a host for refurbed 360s which had been modified as tester controllers. Each 360 had a full compliment of drives, printer, punch/reader and all the controllers and modified CROS for controlling the test hardware which was a 360 CPU frame modified with the tester logic boards.

[\/\/ayne]

Christmas...about 1988 or so, the new 8-track looking tapes had just come out. Very cool with big cartridge racks that automatically loaded and unloaded tapes. The tapes were all stacked on a new shelf against the wall, the wall with the massive heater duct, it did not matter, after all it was the mainframe room! The heater would never be turned on anyway. But then, Christmas! Everyone was home for the holidays...except for the guard from a temp agency who had to stay in the mainframe room...and he got cold! Why was this room so cold? He searched and searched...and found a way to turn on the heater! Ahhhh, that's better, he thought as millions of dollars worth of data warped it's way out of existance! I always wondered what happened to that guy!

[EggsAckley]

I remember working at Gallo Winery (I was a teenager) and was working in the "computer room," which was the entire basement of the office building. This was in 1960-1961. Don't know what the computer was, but it was enormous, and I DO remember the head of the department making music come out from somewhere on the machine. What a monster!!

[Vermonter]

"2401s were the high-speed rewind models"

Those are the ones. Thanks

[txhurl]

Tri-chloro-tri-ethofluorine? What the hell was that stuff we cleaned the tape heads with?

[Wheens]

I remember having discussions with other IBMers on whether or not we would ever see memory (core) get as low as a dollar a byte!!!!

[syriacus]

In 1969 we had
360/30s and 360/40s
Lots of IBM utility programs
Keypunched cards
Disk, drum and tape storage
Sweaters handy, to put on when we went into the computer rooms.

[Citizen Tom Paine]

Lets really go back. Nothing had a higher priority running on the 1620 than payroll. Everything got knocked off for it. Another walk down memory lane was the 1130 which I spend days plotting data on. Going back further with FORTRAN II was the 709 which was replaced by the 7090.

Ah! the return to the days of the PDP-4 with 4K of RAM.