It's been over eight years since touching a mainframe and I do miss some aspects of working with IBM big systems but more for the concepts than the actual tasks. Mystery Lady is familiar with some of this as well because she was in the nefarious world of mainframes prior to becoming a nurse. As with me, neither of us really had any business in data processing but, Lennon told us how it goes, you make plans and life happens.
Here's an Amdahl V/6 and this one was a legend back in the days of SWORCC (i.e. SouthWestern Ohio Regional Computing Center) which was a cooperative alliance between the University of Cincinnati and Miami University which was located within about thirty miles in Oxford, Ohio. This was long before there was any type of Internet connectivity so it received quite a bit of attention at that time.
Mystery Lady may remember the row of windows from the main conference room which overlooked the machine room and gave that great feeling of working in a fish bowl. There was one situation in which I was in the machine room because the sysfrogs would pour in there when some type of problem arose since then we could hang about looking concerned while we dutifully fixed it.
During the course of that situation, there was a group of the heavy heavies in the conference room and one of them was VP Mark Ullman, the Great God of the Money. I was summoned from the problem-fixing situation to the conference room where Ullman informed me smoking was not advised in the machine room.
My temptation was to fire back at him, "Well, I tell you what, grandpa. How about I stay out here to smoke the cigarette while you trundle your ass in there to fix the fucking computer, alright? How does that work for you, sugar?"
My ol' Dad would have kind of dug it because Ullman was a useless prick but my ol' Dad was the one who got me the job and that would have brought big stink on him if I had said it. There are moments of discretion in my life, not many but some.
That's the system console and parts of the actual mainframe are behind it. The floor is raised for air circulation and also for exceptionally-large cables. The ceiling for the machine room was also suspended for similar reasons but there was no chance the big cables could go up there.
The darker unit on the desk was only used for storing files, etc but the doors to the lighter ones on the right were significant. If those were open, that meant hardware troubles and big ones.
Note: the above is not the SWORCC system but rather representative kit from Amdahl.
I'm sure Mystery Lady remembers hours and hours sitting in front of that damnable console where one of the biggest responsibilities was writing on paper labels the details about whatever had been written to a tape. Such messages came constantly and that was a large part of the life of a mainframe console operator. It was cool to be running the main console since that made you the shift's Captain Kirk but it also meant writing zillions of those infuriating labels.
In many of the older sci fi movies, old IBM tape drives were shown to demonstrate the computer was 'thinking' and the directors did that because the computers otherwise didn't do anything you can watch. Sitting there watching tapes spin was the next best thing so hum a few bars.
The comely lass shown is what was often known as a 'tape ape' since her job was to sit by a console to wait for messages to fetch another tape from the library to mount it on the appropriate tape drive. This would continue without interruption through the entire shift so operators almost always hated being assigned to the tape room.
You see above the tape drives where some tapes are stacked and those are either tapes which have not yet been filed back in the library or they are required based on some job's runbook which was a paper document describing a job's resource requirements. Those resources could be fetched in advance to try to reduce run time by ensuring the resources were quickly available. Of course this sounds primitive; it was.
Long hair and bell bottoms were still happening and that's the best girls ever looked. I'm not biased on this in any way of course. Her clothes do fit nicely, tho, don't they, Roger Dodger.
Tip: cool the jets, Rog. She's retired by now.
A standing joke back then was about getting into data processing to meet girls since, apart from a few rare exceptions, there were none. I did, tho, and we got married.
There was an early attempt to get away from tapes through CDC's VDAM unit (i.e. Variable Direct Access Method or some such) and the device contained a number of tapes on cartridges which were more or less cylindrical and about five inches long. A robot arm selected whichever cartridge was required and would then mount it for access by the application. This was in the early 80s when such automated technology was in its infancy and it had one tiny problem: it didn't work too well.
Bill Emmons was charged with the responsibility for supporting that horrible beast and he would invariably discover after arriving at work there were cartridges all over the floor of the device where the robot arm had dropped them. Whoopsie.
His wig flipped into outer space not so long after that and he ended up preaching in West Virginia somewhere. I swear this is true. Later he decided playing with hilljacks and snakes really wasn't such a great idea and he came back to data processing. The business takes all sorts, man (larfs).
Then there was Radar who had a year's supply of socks because he believed it was more efficient to save them up and do one annual sock wash. The man had a Masters in Mathematics.
Maybe some of you codgers actually remember this time and one aspect sysfrogs loved was wearing hideous ties. It was required to wear a tie but they didn't say what it had to look like so sysfrogs enjoyed finding real horrors. Anything which violated any standard of style in fashion was immediately a perfect selection. We were such rebels, weren't we.
Ed: sure, real scofflaws
Here's an analogous IBM system from somewhat later but not too much.
This system shows varying levels of sophistication and maybe amusing to you is the device in the center just beyond the console is a card reader. You would put a physical stack of punched cards into the hopper and it would read them while making a sound somewhat like when a bank money machine counts paper currency. Welcome to the new age of mainframes, huh? (larfs)
My early programming was with punched cards and I had the latest program I had written in the pocket of my jacket. I was already enthusiastic about riding motorcycles back then and, during one glorious corner the cards flew out of my pocket, resulting in an outstanding imitation of a snowstorm. There wasn't even a point in turning around. That program was never coming back.
Neither of these systems is a particularly big one and their computer power is laughable relative to even small devices today but they were formidable at that time. You hear little about IBM mainframe processing but it lives today with z/OS still running strongly. I hear IBM is not doing as well as it once did but that's just a general vibe and I don't follow news on it. Elimination of IBM mainframes as a platform seems unlikely to happen altogether due to the staggering volume of software which is written in COBOL for business applications.
Who knows what elicited it but I got curious as to whether FORTRAN survives. My interest was not in scientific software so I used FORTRAN only long enough to get the hang of writing it and then I moved along to other languages but I was almost delighted to see the language still thrives although it wasn't entirely clear on which platforms. It looks like it definitely plays in huge ways for supercomputer applications such as weather forecasting but those machines usually aren't IBM although I have no idea what became of Cray, etc.
For today's systems, the entire mainframe is about the size of refrigerator and the operator never touches tape or disks anymore. The VDAM mentioned above became a device twenty feet across and eight or nine feet tall. You absolutely had to be outside it before it went online as it was the said the robotic arm(s) could easily kill you.
These days the computer has receded so much most have almost no contact with one. There are desktop machines which have some fascinating powers but they don't matter much relative to systems which support an entire continent, etc.
There's no need for a then and now contrast since the pictures show you how distant that environment was. Of course it's changed a lot since then.
It's evolution in action, you know.
Here's an Amdahl V/6 and this one was a legend back in the days of SWORCC (i.e. SouthWestern Ohio Regional Computing Center) which was a cooperative alliance between the University of Cincinnati and Miami University which was located within about thirty miles in Oxford, Ohio. This was long before there was any type of Internet connectivity so it received quite a bit of attention at that time.
Mystery Lady may remember the row of windows from the main conference room which overlooked the machine room and gave that great feeling of working in a fish bowl. There was one situation in which I was in the machine room because the sysfrogs would pour in there when some type of problem arose since then we could hang about looking concerned while we dutifully fixed it.
During the course of that situation, there was a group of the heavy heavies in the conference room and one of them was VP Mark Ullman, the Great God of the Money. I was summoned from the problem-fixing situation to the conference room where Ullman informed me smoking was not advised in the machine room.
My temptation was to fire back at him, "Well, I tell you what, grandpa. How about I stay out here to smoke the cigarette while you trundle your ass in there to fix the fucking computer, alright? How does that work for you, sugar?"
My ol' Dad would have kind of dug it because Ullman was a useless prick but my ol' Dad was the one who got me the job and that would have brought big stink on him if I had said it. There are moments of discretion in my life, not many but some.
That's the system console and parts of the actual mainframe are behind it. The floor is raised for air circulation and also for exceptionally-large cables. The ceiling for the machine room was also suspended for similar reasons but there was no chance the big cables could go up there.
The darker unit on the desk was only used for storing files, etc but the doors to the lighter ones on the right were significant. If those were open, that meant hardware troubles and big ones.
Note: the above is not the SWORCC system but rather representative kit from Amdahl.
I'm sure Mystery Lady remembers hours and hours sitting in front of that damnable console where one of the biggest responsibilities was writing on paper labels the details about whatever had been written to a tape. Such messages came constantly and that was a large part of the life of a mainframe console operator. It was cool to be running the main console since that made you the shift's Captain Kirk but it also meant writing zillions of those infuriating labels.
In many of the older sci fi movies, old IBM tape drives were shown to demonstrate the computer was 'thinking' and the directors did that because the computers otherwise didn't do anything you can watch. Sitting there watching tapes spin was the next best thing so hum a few bars.
The comely lass shown is what was often known as a 'tape ape' since her job was to sit by a console to wait for messages to fetch another tape from the library to mount it on the appropriate tape drive. This would continue without interruption through the entire shift so operators almost always hated being assigned to the tape room.
You see above the tape drives where some tapes are stacked and those are either tapes which have not yet been filed back in the library or they are required based on some job's runbook which was a paper document describing a job's resource requirements. Those resources could be fetched in advance to try to reduce run time by ensuring the resources were quickly available. Of course this sounds primitive; it was.
Long hair and bell bottoms were still happening and that's the best girls ever looked. I'm not biased on this in any way of course. Her clothes do fit nicely, tho, don't they, Roger Dodger.
Tip: cool the jets, Rog. She's retired by now.
A standing joke back then was about getting into data processing to meet girls since, apart from a few rare exceptions, there were none. I did, tho, and we got married.
There was an early attempt to get away from tapes through CDC's VDAM unit (i.e. Variable Direct Access Method or some such) and the device contained a number of tapes on cartridges which were more or less cylindrical and about five inches long. A robot arm selected whichever cartridge was required and would then mount it for access by the application. This was in the early 80s when such automated technology was in its infancy and it had one tiny problem: it didn't work too well.
Bill Emmons was charged with the responsibility for supporting that horrible beast and he would invariably discover after arriving at work there were cartridges all over the floor of the device where the robot arm had dropped them. Whoopsie.
His wig flipped into outer space not so long after that and he ended up preaching in West Virginia somewhere. I swear this is true. Later he decided playing with hilljacks and snakes really wasn't such a great idea and he came back to data processing. The business takes all sorts, man (larfs).
Then there was Radar who had a year's supply of socks because he believed it was more efficient to save them up and do one annual sock wash. The man had a Masters in Mathematics.
Maybe some of you codgers actually remember this time and one aspect sysfrogs loved was wearing hideous ties. It was required to wear a tie but they didn't say what it had to look like so sysfrogs enjoyed finding real horrors. Anything which violated any standard of style in fashion was immediately a perfect selection. We were such rebels, weren't we.
Ed: sure, real scofflaws
Here's an analogous IBM system from somewhat later but not too much.
This system shows varying levels of sophistication and maybe amusing to you is the device in the center just beyond the console is a card reader. You would put a physical stack of punched cards into the hopper and it would read them while making a sound somewhat like when a bank money machine counts paper currency. Welcome to the new age of mainframes, huh? (larfs)
My early programming was with punched cards and I had the latest program I had written in the pocket of my jacket. I was already enthusiastic about riding motorcycles back then and, during one glorious corner the cards flew out of my pocket, resulting in an outstanding imitation of a snowstorm. There wasn't even a point in turning around. That program was never coming back.
Neither of these systems is a particularly big one and their computer power is laughable relative to even small devices today but they were formidable at that time. You hear little about IBM mainframe processing but it lives today with z/OS still running strongly. I hear IBM is not doing as well as it once did but that's just a general vibe and I don't follow news on it. Elimination of IBM mainframes as a platform seems unlikely to happen altogether due to the staggering volume of software which is written in COBOL for business applications.
Who knows what elicited it but I got curious as to whether FORTRAN survives. My interest was not in scientific software so I used FORTRAN only long enough to get the hang of writing it and then I moved along to other languages but I was almost delighted to see the language still thrives although it wasn't entirely clear on which platforms. It looks like it definitely plays in huge ways for supercomputer applications such as weather forecasting but those machines usually aren't IBM although I have no idea what became of Cray, etc.
For today's systems, the entire mainframe is about the size of refrigerator and the operator never touches tape or disks anymore. The VDAM mentioned above became a device twenty feet across and eight or nine feet tall. You absolutely had to be outside it before it went online as it was the said the robotic arm(s) could easily kill you.
These days the computer has receded so much most have almost no contact with one. There are desktop machines which have some fascinating powers but they don't matter much relative to systems which support an entire continent, etc.
There's no need for a then and now contrast since the pictures show you how distant that environment was. Of course it's changed a lot since then.
It's evolution in action, you know.
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