I do have the obligatory story of dropping someone elses set of cards and almost losing my job.
Another was I put someones job card on the top of a box of cards that looked like their program and 'dropped it accidentally' ... Cards flew 20' in every direction. I almost got throttled for that! (and it would have been justified manslaughter IMHO). One time, we did have to restore an entire IBM 370 VM system from scratch. Started with having to do a punch card boot loader. Had to learn how to punch the 3 cars right to get it to load from a tape drive. Took way to much time. ... After that I started getting more interested in disaster recovery and what it really takes. ... Oh yea, we did get the datacenter restored in about 24 hours after that. But that was sweating a lot of blood to do that. Learning HOW the boot loader works and even writing a few was a good thing to do. I started with doing paper tape on my Altair 8800, and with a friend wrote a monitor system. Even wrote a interrupt handler for the Intel 8080 interrupts. A friend designed the hardware interrupt processor card to go in my Altair (using Intel specs). ... Also reading the circuit diagrams for the Altair front panel was interesting. The 8080 had no 'single step' or 'load address' functions like front panels have, so it generated, in hardware, the software instructions and handled the clock for the 8080 to give 'front panel operations'. This was before we used dynamic ram, so the static ram was very forgiving allowing for elongated clock cycles. A friend and I purchased a speech synthesizer and built some easily demoed software (loaded from paper tape) to make it talk. Not the standard dictionary based but phoneme based enunciation for the El Paso Computer Group back in the late '70s to early '80s. At that time the computer was a 4MHz Z80, 16K of memory, Processor Technology 3P+S interface card, Processor Technology video card (64x16 character memory mapped display driving a modified B&W TV set to be the monitor), an acoustic coupler modem, with my Oliver Engineering Paper Tape Reader, and keyboard, both interfaced to a couple of the parallel ports on the 3P+S (standing for 3 parallel ports and 1 serial RS232 or TTL levels). Eventually I built a SWPC TV Typewriter 2 (Southwest Technical Products from San Antonio TX) to be my 'glass teletype' that used the serial port and it also interfaced to the parallel keyboard. Again a 64x16 display with dynamic shift register memory... interesting circuits to understand especially since I have always been a software guy). Enough memories. On Sat, Jun 14, 2014 at 5:06 AM, Alex Smith (K4RNT) <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm still kinda surprised that silly power users or things don't insert > something like that into the code of their GCC when they bootstrap their > compilers, just to freak people out. ;) > > I'd like to hear more stories about working with IBM 370s and S/390s, and > more than the standard story of dropping a stack of punchcards and losing > the order. ;) > > Buy you a beer, Howard? :) > > > " ' With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, > the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all > irrevocably.' Those words were uttered by Judge Aaron Satie as wisdom and > warning... The first time any man's freedom is trodden on we’re all > damaged." - Jean-Luc Picard, quoting Judge Aaron Satie, Star Trek: TNG > episode "The Drumhead" > - Alex Smith > - Huntsville, Alabama metropolitan area USA > > > On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 6:23 PM, Paul Boniol <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> On Thu, Jun 12, 2014 at 2:25 PM, Howard White <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> On 06/12/2014 02:24 PM, Wesley Duffee-Braun wrote: >>> >>>> "we ever develop software that can further refine its own programming" >>>> >>>> sounds like a compiler. >>>> >>>> >>> Not like the IBM 370 COBOL compiler I once worked on: >>> >>> "Probable user error, correct and re-submit" -- thanks a lot. >>> >>> Howard >> >> >> One of my teachers worked on the first compilers for NASA. He said they >> had errors something like "You forgot a closing parenthesis you idiot", but >> they made them take the last part out. >> >> Paul >> >> -- >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "NLUG" group. >> To post to this group, send email to [email protected] >> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to >> [email protected] >> For more options, visit this group at >> http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en >> >> --- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "NLUG" group. >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an >> email to [email protected]. >> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. >> > > -- > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "NLUG" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected] > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected] > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en > > --- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "NLUG" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- ><> ... Jack "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart"... Colossians 3:23 "If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the precipitate" - Henry J. Tillman "Anyone who has never made a mistake, has never tried anything new." - Albert Einstein "You don't manage people; you manage things. You lead people." - Admiral Grace Hopper, USN "a nanosecond is the time it takes electrons to propigate 11.8 inches" - " - http://youtu.be/JEpsKnWZrJ8 "Life is complex: it has a real part and an imaginary part." - Martin Terma -- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. 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