[NCjim]

I'm proud to have worked with the beast for over 35 years!

[Support Free Republic]

Donate Here By Secure Server

[CFC__VRWC]

Sorry, but all SF Chron/SFGate articles have to be excerpted. This is a recent development.

[FreedomFarmer]

AS 400 bump.

[Sub-Driver]

me 3..........What other machine can run J2EE, UNIX, Linux, z/OS, CICS, etc all in one box with all the 9's (99.999 up time)

[syriacus]

I'm proud to have worked with the beast for over 35 years!

Congratulations!

[PogySailor]

Just about to get ride of our last FEP. Some people just can't stand to get rid of their 2400 baud EP lines....

[Fitzcarraldo]

I was working late one night and got bad fever chills from the flu. It got so bad I went into the machine room and lay down on the floor behind the computer's hot air exhaust.

[sailor4321]

I remember the 1401. We used it to replace IBM 402 and 407 accounting machines (and for a million other things).

Anybody out there remember wiring boards?

[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.

[\/\/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!

[JoeGar]

I cut my teeth coding SPS on a 4096-character (bytes had not been invented yet) IBM 1401 with two tape drives and a printer. I can remember having to overlay two characters because my code compiled into 4098 characters.

[TC Rider]

MRs. TC was an operator back in the late 70s, swapping disk packs etc for Walter Drake and Sons in Colorado Springs. They had Honeywell mainframes. I remember going to visit her on third shift and playing 'trek' on a monitor. My first exposure to computer games.

[TheOldSchool]

I worked for Boeing in Huntsville, Alabama when Boeing was the prime contractor for the Saturn V development. The Saturn V was the rocket that took man to the moon. The simulation work we did used an IBM 7094/7044 direct couple system. The 7044 handled all of the input/output (I/O) and the 7094 did the number crunching. Man, those were the days of programs that ran for days at a time.

[dljordan]

Damn! You must be old! I've only been doing it since 75'. Mainframes still rule.

[Darheel]

I just informed our AS400 support staff that today is the 40th anniversary, and that it's time to party!

Now get back to work!

[tubavil]

DOS/VSE/AF

[Contra]

Wasn't the IBM motto "bigger is better?"

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Nothing compares with the 360/370 ....3090 ...MVS...VM!

[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.