Just realised my role. I'm the boss...

the BOFH is losing his touch and starting to ramble! He'll be joining Management and shifting paradigms in no time!

of the way we weeeere...

Normally, this would have been great, but after last week, well, I guess it didn't have much of a chance, did it?

Give it an hour , there will be 50 cattle-prod worthy stories below...

A PDP 11/34 with a 12" removable platter disk drive. It had a massive 2MB of storage and we had a VAX 11/750 with the"washing macine" removal disk drives. Theses stored 45MB per disk pack.

KZZZZEEEERRRRTTTTTTTTT!!!!!!!!!!!

Sorry must go. The men in white coats want me

I had a VAX system once... it was good for cleaning 'spillages'.

How long before they invent a perpetual energy machine to power that cattle prod... it always seems to need it's batteries changing.

I'm envisaging either nuclear power, or a mag-lev flywheel attachment!

You 'ad a VAX? You were lucky! We 'ad to manage with a PDP11 and long persistence screens. I remember I wrote an app to display "THE BOSS IS A WINKER" all night so that it would burn the message into the phosphor...oy, gerroff &%*%)("^£$NO CARRIER

(We apologise for the interruption in transmission. It's time for Mr Smith's medication)

Yup, I started with Burroughs 30 years ago.

I surely recall "customers" paying loads for an upgrade, which consisted of removal of the restricting "cripple-card".

Not just Burroughs, but it was standard procedure in the days when the IT industry was the DP industry.

Ah, those wood-burning steam-powered computers.....

No wonder they keep needing to change the batteries - keeping it in a damp place like a toilet is abound to cause a certain amount of discharge.

mines the one with the tin foil hat and anti static strip trailing behind

Haven't heard that name in a while - brought the memories flooding back of the Burroughs B6930. And do the youth of today believe you when you talk about writing your programmes on punch cards and sending them away with an elastic band around them, only to receive them back the next day with a huge red circle on the card containing the line you got wrong... the heck they do. Me, I used to live in cardboard box in t'middle of motorway...

about the time me, Babbage and Ada Lovelace had this great idea about using Jacquard cards in the difference engine?

Ah... Nostalgia's not what it used to be.

could this be the start of the pfy's election campaign to become the BOFH?

lets face it, the BOFH is getting soft in his old age, seems like forevever since we last had a beancounter roasting and this boss must be a record holder in bofh vs boss life expectancy terms!

bring on the pfy - unleash the psychopathic fury within!

mines the coat hanging on the suction tube of the black and orange VAX multi purpose wet and dry carpet cleaning device

That I had a PDP-11/03. Now that was a machine! It was the industrial control version of the PDP-11. Came with a whopping 4K of SRAM (None of that silly DRAM stuff). It had a pair of 14 inch drives that about caused me to kill myself lugging them down the stairs.

Oh, you want to hear about computer room stories? Well, there was the time the contractor showed up and replaced some of the shot light bulbs in the computer room. Then, as he was leaving, he leaned his ladder against the door, and one of the steps hit the EPO (Emergency Power Off) button, shutting down the entire room. Ouch! Well, the logical thing to do was to was to put a shield around the EPO button. So, a contract was let, and the contractor showed up. The first thing he did was to bring his ladder into the computer room and lean it against the wall. KLUNK! Yep, right on the EPO button again.

Oh, wait, you wanted stories about the insides of computers? Well, they used to use these little Iron doughnuts for storage. This was called core memory. Want to see my core plane?

That should be enough to keep y'all satisfied for a while.

Dave

...that reminds me of Algol 68, of which I have fond memories (sniff).

I used a B6700 - before that an ICL 1904 (yes, the UK used to design and build mainframes). All with punched cards, of course.

OK, I'll go now...

Shall I share with you the joys of upgrading this machine from 16 to 24K?

PS, the PDP11s wre NOT a peice of cack. Many happy years on 11s with RSTS/E and RSX/11

I'll never forget the look on the college lecturer's face when he said about the paper tape that he'd used to load programs during the early days of computing, and I held up a strip of mylar "paper tape" I'd punched the day before...

Saddest thing was, he could still 'read' the programe from the patter of the holes!

And then there was lef kwh bqoeyg hl nhqh qh'h9u gy]t 1[]'] yy p it

Damn my card punch just clogged again!

We had a Honywell 3200 and a 2015 complete with SORT disks weighing 10kg each that needed to be moved around the systems, 6 2400ft tape drives on each partition and JOY of JOY nearly 100 punch girls, Christmas parties were great!!

Young operators don't know how well off they are these days!! Bring back the '70s that's what I say!!

Mine's the coat with the read/write rings in the pockets

Lemme tell you about paper tape. And the bin that held the little punched-out dots.

And the air-conditioning unit the dots were poured into.

Operators had fun back then, sticking print room operatos into blue bins full of carbon paper from multipart stationary, pushing said bin into a lift, turning the light out and sending it to the top floor!

Unfortunate that the guy was scared of the dark!!

Read/write ring fights, computer room cricket and my particular favourite roller chair races

My first encounter with anything bigger than a PC was a VAX 11/750 (or was it a 780? No, I'm sure it was a 750). Not my own, though; it was at uni, in 1989. VAX/VMS was a bit like MS-DOS, only all grown up with versioning and stuff. Not that you could keep many versions kicking around in 3 megabytes. Then I got an account on the VAX Cluster: a pair of 8650s. It had this thing on it called VAX NOTES, a distant forerunner of a blog. And a whopping 5 megabytes of personal storage each!

The '750 was decommissioned in 1991 or '92. I'll always regret not taking it off their hands, but I was young and had no sense then.

Oh, and I often used to beige-box a payphone in one of the student residences to connect an Amiga running a VT100 terminal emulator to the VAX, via a 1200/75 modem. I'd have loved to have used a real VT220 (you could do some amazing display hacks with them .....), but it was too heavy to lug on the no. 16 bus.

...actually, I'm smart enough to stop before I go to for and get hit with the cattle prod.

In any event, I think that we're all the 'Boss' in this story in some way, if we weren't, we probably wouldn't be the type reading The Reg!

Paris, because like the boss, nobody cares what she says!

Hahaha- too right AC- I once broke a finger catching someone out batting a 28k USR modem at my head

Our favourite game involved "Who can give the boss the most fantastic explation of how this works" To this day he is convinced that processors have an organic base to "speed up calcualtions" made of extracts from animal brains.

That I had a PDP-11/03. Now that was a machine! It was the industrial control version of the PDP-11. Came with a whopping 4K of SRAM (None of that silly DRAM stuff). It had a pair of 14 inch drives that about caused me to kill myself lugging them down the stairs.

(snip)

.... At least you HAD disk drives.. All I had was a dodgy papertape reader

to load software. I did have core, though. So as long as none of the

lusers managed to break anything, all I had to was press HALT, and

turn of the power at the end of a week. Monday morning, just enter

1000, deposit and RUN...

It's the one with the large charged capacitors in the pockets

I'm still < 30, and I too keep feeling like I'm that old guy with no point stories about the days of old. Reading this story acutally helped me - whilst I have worked on a VAX, I have no idea what a 11/780 is.

That makes me feel much better :)

Paris, because she doesn't know what 11/780 is either.

Not to disrespect the legions of PDP & VAX fans, but my fondest story on the olden days was my first year at MIT (1973); during my Intro to Computing course, the professor starts to talk about new developments in computer technology, and he pulls out a then-state of the art HP-35, proceeding to call it "the neatest little hand job he'd ever seen!!"

(cue hysterical laughter from 200 freshmen!)

The biggest fun was invoking the "shower of chad" on your enemy. The sharp edges of the chad (yes, like that famous hanging chad of Florida fame) would stick in everything. It took forever for it to get out. If one had a machine that produced punch cards (not a silly keypunch) it usually didn't take long to fill up the chad bin to a capacity for the task. Other fun was making of lace cards (if you could get it done). It wasn't very easy.

All of this migrated to these silly things called terminals (ASR-33's were a favorite) that ran at 10 characters/second. These gave way to units with IBM Selectric typewriter mechanisms which were MUCH faster (by about 50%) and ran at 134.5 bps (not 110 like the teletypes).

Oh, and stuff like lower case was a luxury!

Must go now. Time for my Prozak......I think it is in the left pocket.

No "walking drive" races???

mine's the one with the custom 60ft channel cable hanging from the side pocket...

The chad was useful for training the new PFYs: we'd have them sort a week's accumulation of the little buggers into numerical order.

"Right, who's turn is it to sort the chad?"

"Not me, I did it last week. Have the new lad do it."

>> I surely recall "customers" paying loads for an upgrade, which consisted of removal of the restricting "cripple-card".

I wish we could take a "cripple-card" out of our pc's today to upgrade lol

First words: "Micromation M-Box", followed by "Sattelite Z64". Ring any bells?

I'll sign off before the batteries are charged.

//Svein

happy days punching cards, then the joy of upgrading to a terminal that said Vulcanising when you wanted to execute anything.

cricking your back pulling platters from a top loading drive.

de-magnetizing backup tapes. only to realise you'd got the wrong one ;)

the joy of moving to a new site with an IBM 4381 - but realising nothing really changed

nostalgia is a frightening thing as I sit at my 3Ghz multi-core machine with a phone on my desk that has more computing power than anything I used in the first few years of work!

Some respect to UK computer history - Elliot 503 (and 803) was a machine! Even Tony Hoare said so! The only problem was to collect the paper tape from floor after run but the machine itself had a real nice voice when processing. Full Algol besides.

Ye Gods, I have loads of stories - the famous KDF9, 8k IBM 360/20 with only an MCFM & a 2501 reader, used to hate getting E02 errors on the console after a 2 hour batch run on a Friday night. And for that matter the very impressive card wrecks you'd get on the 083 sorter.

Magnetic media? That's for woosses

It was pretty advanced, actually. But the main storage was FastRand drum storage. Huge iron cylinders rotating on a horizontal axis. I don't remember how much storage they had, but it was transient. We loaded and dumped tapes. There was a disk drive somewhere that was used for sorting.

Then I downgraded to a little RCA Spectra 70, with washing machine drives. Load cards, go over to the console, type MON 56K (the entire partition), or 32K for a COBOL compile without sorting.

I could go on, but just hand me my granny shawl there..

You're bringing back memories. I used an 11/750 and 11/780, and just about remembr a PDP11. I do remember the 8 inch floppy, and a software house sent me a system upgrade by putting one in a magazine and posting it to me - the disk arrived U shaped.