Contractor Haters

[malvolio]

I quite liked VME/B.

But to give you a flavour of how far back I can go, first computer I worked on didn't have an operating system. When they brought out EXEC and you could run things without having to type them in, we thought it was wonderful.

Ahhh those were the days

[milanbenes]

jeeeeez

the geriatrics are in town today

Malvolio,

I think you'll find,

" first computer I worked on didn't have an operating system. When they brought out EXEC and you could run things without having to type them in, we thought it was wonderful",

the thing you are talking about was an electric cooker.

Milan.

[ancient]

I quite liked VME/B.

But to give you a flavour of how far back I can go, first computer I worked on didn't have an operating system. When they brought out EXEC and you could run things without having to type them in, we thought it was wonderful.

Ahhh those were the days

FI#XPJW#DISK

GO 21

Manual EXEC was available on the ICL 2903/04 range

[The Late, Great JC]

Probably not as many as you, I am a J2EE man these days.

But go on, just for nostalgia give use some ideas.

Milan, try looking up accumulator in the dictionary and tell us what it is.

To try and help you I will try and give you a clue e.g. it is not a battery

LFPZ

It's not really my party trick but I remember a guy at Burtons reckoned there were over 20 (Decimal, not octal ).

[malvolio]

Ah yes, #XPJW, #XPJC and who can forget #XQMY? However I'm talkng about a 1904F in 1971 - 64Kb memory (yes, young uns, Kilobytes) and 40 Mb of disk storage on 5 drives with 8 platters each. None of this high density winchester rubbish for us.

Modern youth, eh? Don't know they're born...

[n5gooner]

Ah yes, #XPJW, #XPJC and who can forget #XQMY? However I'm talkng about a 1904F in 1971 - 64Kb memory (yes, young uns, Kilobytes) and 40 Mb of disk storage on 5 drives with 8 platters each. None of this high density winchester rubbish for us.

Modern youth, eh? Don't know they're born...

winchester disks.......who remebers the conner pray......to get the disk going....or the park command,

[ancient]

Ah yes, #XPJW, #XPJC and who can forget #XQMY? However I'm talkng about a 1904F in 1971 - 64Kb memory (yes, young uns, Kilobytes) and 40 Mb of disk storage on 5 drives with 8 platters each. None of this high density winchester rubbish for us.

Modern youth, eh? Don't know they're born...

I think what I learn't then is still as relevant today.

So many of these "modern systems" seem to suffer performance problems.

More "Tin" is not allways the answer, it's often about file overflow, indexing and caching and a good understanding of I/O and processor usage is very useful.

Not to mention other things like - end-to-end exception handling, bandwidth and good old systems management.

[threaded]

And in some ways things have got worse. George didn't have a millenium bug problem, for example.

[oldgeezer]

Nostalgia

I've always been an infrastructure man and as we're going down the old road, it brought to mind my first mainframe, the ICL 1901T running George 2, then moved onto the 2900 range and VME when things got really interesting. Then took a backward step into IBM mainframe world running MVS, JCL, CA-7. Last time I logged on using a TSO terminal was back in 1989 then moved into LAN/WLAN's and servers. Operating systems so far:
George 2, VME, IBM MVS, DOS, Novell Netware, OS/2, Windows NTv4-2003. How many more I sometimes wonder to myself.

[ancient]

I've always been an infrastructure man and as we're going down the old road, it brought to mind my first mainframe, the ICL 1901T running George 2, then moved onto the 2900 range and VME when things got really interesting. Then took a backward step into IBM mainframe world running MVS, JCL, CA-7. Last time I logged on using a TSO terminal was back in 1989 then moved into LAN/WLAN's and servers. Operating systems so far:
George 2, VME, IBM MVS, DOS, Novell Netware, OS/2, Windows NTv4-2003. How many more I sometimes wonder to myself.

Suppose we are now seriously off-topic and worthy of a Milan happy slapping.

In the early 80's I remember VAX/VMS it was very impressive, but could only do byte rather than block orientated communications, very heavy on the network at the time. It had case-sensitive language editors and could put graphics on the screen. Weak in other areas; I wrote a TP performance monitor for VAX/VCMS. Cuttler, the father of VAX/VMS went on to do Windows NT for Microsoft. I liked the Windows NT approach e.g. a virtual machine operating system; akin to ICL VME. I know Microsoft has tried to get into the mainframe datacentre space but I don't think they have managed it yet.

Might be all old bull, but solid foundations, though probably not worthy of the 3 page modern CV.