teeheehee
Nice to see them kept on their toes !
"Oh this takes me back to the early days of ST225s!" the Boss burbles. I am getting a personally tailored lesson in being careful what I wish for. On one hand, the PFY and myself wanted a new Boss who at least knew which end of a keyboard he could shove up his arse when he asked for the ability to type Norwegian potato …
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I remember when...
Seriously I was visiting the computer room (they didn't have IT in those days) at the top of a chemical factory's stack somewhere in Teesside when an alarm went off after a particular vigorous shaking of whatever it was that they they were brewing under my feet when the Halon Dump went off.
It was like trying to breathe a brick wall.
Health and Safety evacuation procedures in those days involved thwacking me around the back of the head to get my attention and then shoving me out of the nearest door roughly.
All in all, an interesting day that.
It was like trying to breathe a brick wall.
You're lucky. When our system went off one night, due to a major lightning strike on the roof, the overpressure from the gas injection shifted the internal walls. Had anyone been in the room I think it would have been more like trying to catch a brick wall dropped from a great height.
"Someone whose career is so far behind him he needs the Hubble telescope to look back on it."
Classic Simon, I will definitely need to steel that.
Speaking of classic, love the return of halon to the plot line. This boss is a crafty one, in an Inspector Clouseau sort of way. I expect that he may survive a few more attempts at being shown the exit. I'd suggest an extended junket for the boss while they use his access to go on a shopping spree and otherwise pad their coffers.
I for one look back fondly to the 80's 70's 60's when I started this career path. Drives in those days barely held megabytes and you could actually see the spinning rust (don't wear a tie when servicing!). Oh, the platters were 14 inches across as well.
And today I'm picking my KSR33 from the repair shop just to seal the deal.
Platters? PLATTERS!?! Real computers used magnetic drums, not disk platters. Consider, for example, the IBM 650 Magnetic Drum Calculator, or the IBM 701 computer with its 732 Magnetic Drum unit:
https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_PH5-19.html
http://www.cedmagic.com/history/ibm-650-drum.html
Then, there was the Univac FASTRAND drum:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIVAC_FASTRAND
The gyroscopic effects those things produced was amazing.
Now, I have told you about core memory and vacuum tubes....
Dave
"...assemble bytes by hand from a box of 1s and 0s and then hammer them into a 150-baud serial cable with a mallet." Young whipper snappers have it so easy.
Try figuring out the EBCDIC code in hex to hand punch a stack of hollerith cards to get the Univac 9300 RPG compiler to add a couple of cards to the program stack to get the silly machine to automatically load the next program card stack instead of having to manually do it.
It was worth it though. Just stack the programs to run one after another and off to the icehouse for a couple of brews.
BTW, I see the spell checker doesn't even recognize EBCDIC, hollerith, Univac, RPG, or icehouse. What the hell is the world coming to?
Ah! The good old days (before bytes and Microsoft) when I would insert code form the switches (remember when computers had control panels?). The old Diablo model 31 disks were great - I would give one to my son with a screw driver and it would keep him busy for an hour as he disassembled it into its component parts. My first computer had vacuum tubes (valves) in it ... oh oh I guess I'm "someone who lives in the shadow of their former glories" ... but it was fun "touching the bits" before everything got so formal and remote.
Ok so place your bets!!
5-1 the boss falls down a lift shaft.
10-1 boss falls down stairs.
15-1 boss has an air-conditioning unit fall on him in the street outside the office.
7-1 the boss gets found with inappropriate images on his computer.
favourites. the boss gets run over in the car park by someone from accounts that has been set up by the BOFH but thinks its all the bosses fault.
the boss falls down a lift shaft - you know, that reminds me of the time when a lift was malfunctioning at a previous employer - the doors opened and a colleague fell 13 floors to his rather sudden death. I tell you, after seeing that splat mark I always check thrice before entering.
boss falls down stairs - did I tell you the story of my last medical checkup. The doctor told me, and I'm being dead serious, that more of his patients die taking the stairs than the elevator.
boss has an air-conditioning unit fall on him in the street outside the office - outside? as in real life outside? I must share this story of the last time I went outside, it was just before that lady took over, what was her name again, Marge something or another...
I'll put a tenner on the boss gets found with inappropriate images on his computer, another tenner says it doesn't stick.
What about the Murder-Bot going on an unscheduled rampage? I think they got it back and it is somewhat broken and perhaps it is time to fix it and upgrade it with new hardware?
... Because, its wrong to let a poor robot languish in the basement just because of a slight programming error.
In my first venture from the world of science into IT the shop was mostly VAX/VMS. The machine room was occupied by two operators sitting side by side watching two terminals. The terminals were displaying apparently identical streams of VMS messages. Both operators were called Simon. Looking back, that seems scary.
but I did have the joy of working with the mainframes at the WARCC (Western Australian Regional Computing Centre while studying Engineering. Punch cards, and green and black terminal screens, along with line printers
Ohoh think I'm turning into that boss! Time to check the subfloor, halon system and make sure there is a lift there before stepping in.