end of an era

[PhysAssist]

remember them daisy wheels.

going thru the closet at work, found 2 cases of tractor feed continous form paper.. 1 letter and 1 wide for a plotter..

I still have 2 part cases in my basement.

 

[Mikeeemo]

Lots of old computer knowledge around here

I worked with JCL language, COBOL and Assembler - often writing "exit routines" for IBM Operating Systems. I started with punch cards - lol. We even had some old gear that used hard-wire boards for their programming. Up until my retirement in 2012, we ran an IBM Mainframe and, for the last 15 years or so, we had about 100 separate servers in the farm. The Mainframe was leaving about the same time I did - a B I G mistake in my opinion, as they have so much more power and security than almost any of these tinker-toy servers in use today.

It's absolutely amazing just how much technical wherewithal I've lost in just over a year into retirement. But, that's OK - I'm now into my new phase as a hobby farmer and loving it.

The mainframe is alive and well. We are training the college grads on how to use it to their advantage. I write JCL, Assembler, & Cobol everyday. We can't afford to rewrite billions of lines code just because folks have been told the mainframe is 'dead'. Major business system run on them all over the world. We see the to technologies blending with the mainframe doing the massive processing & the PC handling the interface.

 

[Soundguy]

SG was that printing issue caused by accounting sofware using ASCII print streams?

in my other thread?

it was a graphics issue.. the way the software presented graphics tot he pinter.. printer was treating them like they were larger than a page.

 

[dmccarty]

Read my knee replacement thread if you want to see me lmake myself ook old

I am reading that thread and the Xray of your leg is helping me loose weight. :laughing::laughing::laughing: Not real hungry after seeing all of the metal in your leg! :shocked:

I have an IBM 5150 PC 1 at home in the closet and I would bet it would work if I powered it up. A few years ago, these are the same years used to count FarmGirls age, I knew a guy who had a 5150 PC 1 on his desk that was serial number 5. Yeppers, the fifth PC IBM built. He wrote much of IBM DOS in assembler and used that machine for years after it was obsolete. Eventually he got a PS/2 Mod 70 but that 5150 PC was still in his office and in use. Now, PC in this case is Personal Computer. IBM had a 5100 PC where PC stood for Portable Computer. That PC weighed over 50 pounds but it did include a B&W monitor and tape drive! :laughing::laughing::laughing:

The S100 systems were kinda on the way out when I bought my first micro computer, aka, an Apple II+.

Later,
Dan

 

[jinman]

Well, I don't know about you guys, but I miss wire wrap backplanes. . . NOT!

 

[dave1949]

Well, I don't know about you guys, but I miss wire wrap backplanes. . . NOT!

I had a really horrid experience with those. I was doing field changes on a CPU and a leeetle curl of removed wrap fell down as I was taking it off. Of course, it landed where it bridged two pins. It took two days of down time and a specialist tracing out the signals for the failing instruction to find it.

I had a suspicion that that was what happened and should have followed my gut instinct to go buy 5 cans of keyboard air blaster and see if I could dislodge it even if I couldn't see it.

We used to do a lot of wire wrap field changes on dead bug style circuit boards.

 

[Soundguy]

Well, I don't know about you guys, but I miss wire wrap backplanes. . . NOT!

BTDT.. kinda miss it.. kinda don't

 

[weedpharma]

One of the things I wanted to do 20 years ago was to program microcontrollers but was put off by the specialised programming hardware . Now we have so many easy micros to choose from. Simply plug into the USB, run the free editor and go for it.

I am playing with the Arduino but finding it a bit hard relearning the C I learnt 20 years ago.

Weedpharma

 

[Soundguy]

i remember when all the transition media was coming out.

jumbo drives.. high density floppies. remember the short lived 2.88 floptical?

zip drives.. zip click drives

bernouli boxes

then those external hdd enclosures.. usb hard drives.

remeber when usb 1.0 hit.. and many had the limititaion of just the root hub and no downstream hubs and 1 device on usb ( NT have that issue? )

 

[Oaktree]

The 360's were cash cows for IBM. Sold a ton of them.

Didn't those 360s use hydraulic actuators for the disc drives? Seals would go bad and there would be oil all over the inside of them. ISTR seeing the IBM techs in their white shirt, tie & dark suits having to work on those beasts. I felt bad for them. At the time (mid 70s) I did tech support for a company that made typesetting equipment, but at least we were allowed to dress a bit more casually.

Our equipment at the time used drum storage...big as a washing machine with a whopping 8meg storage capacity!! I think the PDP 8's we used maxed out at 32k core...no bloatware in those days!!