Re: JCL

In message <e7542e750707201120g3041c099k45760bdfffdfea61@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Pete Eggers <peter.m.eggers@xxxxxxxxx> writes
Ah, the 64k memory box... Memory was called "core" not "RAM" back then.
Why? Because every memory bit was a tiny magnetic donut called a "core",
hand strung at the factory with 2 wires -- one horizontal and one vertical.
The refrigerator sized cabinet not only housed this core memory, but a large
oil tank and pump to keep the core memory cool.

And it was non-volatile, too. You could take the 10k 'system' memory board out of our Singer System Ten, put it in to someone else's machine, and carry right on.

And there was a bit you could flip on that memory board that would disable your System Ten instantly; and it being non-volatile meant there was no way to turn it on again, except by popping the affected board into another System Ten, as a non-system partition, and running a special diagnostic program to reach into that board and flip the bit back.

Anyone seen the precursor to disks? Magnetic drum storage. The control
hardware was much simpler because there was exactly the same number of bits,
traveling at the same speed, no matter where the data was on the drum.

Yup. Univac FH880s, in 1968. 880k in 88 tracks. Luxury. Dual Univac 494s running the Contorts real-time operating system, programmed in Neliac (the US Navy-extended ALGOL for real-time).

British European Airways flight reservation system. Nowadays, we'd call it an online system, rather than real-time one, but that was then.

Interesting progression of user input devices - specialised teletypes for the initial reservation system, where the operator would take a 'flight card' - actually a *** of paper with printed information inside a rigid transparent plastic carrier with a serrated bottom edge, like a key - and when (s)he put this card in the UID, it read the serrations to see which flight was being booked.

Next, the Bunker Ramo for the later passenger check-in system - an oscilloscope-like screen, 22 by 10, and a non-QWERTY keyboard.

The keyboard logic wasn't very good, and you could make the terminal do all sorts of interesting things by pressing multiple keys at once. We had competitions to find the most bizarre behaviour that wasn't actually a crash...

And sanity at last with the cargo reservation system, with 80 by 24 Cossor screens with QWERTY keyboards

I loved to load those paper tapes on the optical reader having sat at a
teletype 'forever' waiting on the attached mechanical readers!

Speaking of paper tape, anyone ever have to bootstrap a machine by entering
data/address pairs through toggle switches on the front panel to load the
operating system's boot program off paper tape?

Luxury. To get our Ferranti ATPs running, we had to toggle the keys to be able to load the foot or so of paper tape bootstrap loader, and only after this could we load the actual OS from its longer roll of paper tape.

And then those new fangled floppy disks. At 8 inches square, they certainly
were floppy! Anyone use those data entry desks with built in 8" floppy
drives? Another new fangled invention by IBM: 96 column cards! Remember
those? Not the standard rectangular 80 column ones with rectangular holes
designed for mechanical readers, but the little square ones with round holes
having 3 sets of 32 characters stacked, and designed for the fancy new
optical readers.

IBM launched these with the System 3. I went to the internal UK launch, where at least one of the design parameters turned out to be that these cards would be quite hard for anyone else to manufacture, ensuring that users would have to buy them from IBM, at IBM-type margins :-)

Another joy: VTOC (Volume Table Of Contents)! No segmented/paged files!
You had to have a current printout of the VTOC to find a 'hole' between
files big enough to hold the new file you wanted to add! Or, do your own
garbage collection by moving files around, one by one, to make a hole big
enough, if there was enough free space. You had to be careful of which end
of the file and copy direction when shifting files to close small holes, as
the copy function would happily copy a file into the middle of itself -- no
bits to waste protecting the machine from stupid human mistakes! ;)

Never met that one, thank goodness.

Anyone remember when techs carried oscilloscopes and logic gate charts? I
can remember helping techs find problems using the logic gate charts to
trace down problems in the hardware. Ah yes, the "good ol' days" of nand
gates!

Yup; I remember when a disk drive went bad on our System Ten, the engineer came out, pulled a board, and actually fixed it onsite with a soldering iron - replacing chips and resistors, etc, as required.

By then (1977) this was the exception rather than the rule, and the engineer would normally have done a board swap; but there wasn't a spare in the UK he could lay his hands on.

I'm too "young" to have used those IBM "computers" that used patch panels
for programming them,

Me too, but I do recall seeing something with such patch panels still in use, and the guy who did the patching explaining it to me. Blowed if I can remember where, though. But they were rich enough to have quite a store of patched-up frames, so they could just swap between regular jobs, rather than repatching. And those things weren't cheap.

Could it have been an ICT batch printing subsystem at BEA? (The poor relations in Ruislip to us real-time high-flyers at WLAT).

On the other end of the size spectrum, anyone ever have the opportunity to
program an original Altair?

No, but I had the opportunity to program an original Spectrum (Sinclair) and its predecessor, the ZX81 - sold as the Timex TS1000 in the US.

You could get a 16k RAM pack for the ZX81, but the basic machine had just 1k of built-in RAM. I had a book of programs for it, called 'What Can I Do In 1K?' Now alas lost, but I still have the ZX81, plus possibly the best game ever written for it, 3D Monster Maze.

You tracked round a maze, in machine code, in which there was a dinosaur, and when you met it, you ran. Or if you didn't, it would lumber realistically towards you, in Basic, and it was game over.

All in black and white of course. No colour, no chain guns. But Doom, and all the other FPS's that followed, are essentially just refinements on this original idea :-)

Remember when Hazeltine was the king of the CRTs? Man, what an improvement
over punched cards, especially for a poor typist like me!

Which gives rise to a thought: if the Internet had arisen anyway, but we still had to input on punched cards, how long ago would it have been that the last tree got used up? :-)

Roy
--
Roy Brown 'Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be
Kelmscott Ltd useful, or believe to be beautiful' William Morris

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