35 Years Ago At Work

by Undecided 6 Replies latest jw friends

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  Undecided

  Hi All,

  I was looking through some old pictures and ran across this one of me at work.
  

  Notice the old IBM model 40 mainframe computer. You had to load the programs from a deck of cards which had an object deck(a source deck compiled) and the control cards, which assigned the tape drives and disk drives(also the tracks you were using on the hard drive). You could change the disk drives to match the paticular requirements of the job you were processing. Times sure have changed.

  I was the PO of the congregation at the time of the picture. Brought back some old memories. I retired from the same company and computer room there. This was the general office of Fildcrest Mills but since I retired it was sold to a Babtist church and is now the church home for the elite in Eden.(Doctors, lawyers, etc.) My brother worked at the same place as a programmer. I really liked my job there.

  I quit once to pioneer, and went back before a year was gone. I was fortunate I did, because my retirement wasn't affected.
  Have a good day,

  Ken P.
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  Cygnus

  Sure wish I had a job like that.
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  LDH

  Woo-hoo!

  What a hottie!

  Thanks for the pic, Ken. Hope you and yours are well.

  Lisa
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  Simon

  I love pics of old computer... amazes me how much processing power can now be carried round in a PDA and so much is wasted (wow, it remembers my 5 phone numbers)

  I don't remember punch cards myself but I remember magnetic tape and changing huge disk packs. Anyone ever heard of PRIME and SyFa ?
• 

  freeman

  Ken P. - Pretty cool picture, that looks like an IBM 360 class computer am I right? The type that you dialed in the load address of the device you wanted to boot off of as I recall, and comes with “core” memory, disk packs, card sorter/stacker/puncher/reader and all that good stuff. Punch cards, wow you are dating yourself my friend. I have a real punch card hung on the wall, just as a display.

  Simon – Don’t know SyFa, But I do remember PRIME. They ran PRIME-OS as their native operating system as I recall. They had a lot of default accounts: SYSTEM, PRIME, TEST. Never ran one myself but I heard quite a few were hacked back-in-the-day. :) Not that I would know, but I’m told very early versions of PRIME-OS had no password protection, just account ID, and people often forgot to remove or change the default accounts. Now don’t get the idea that I’m a hacker I just heard about this stuff is all. :)

  Thanks for the memories

  PS Simon, your board is so cool, thanks!

  Freeman
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  Undecided

  Hi Freeman,

  You are right about the computer being a Model 360. We later updated to the Model 40s. I go back to the IBM 407 accounting machines with the boards that I programmed by wires. They used punched cards only and printed reports from them. The first real computer was a Model 650 with vaccum tubes and a magnetic drum. The input and output was punched cards. The first solid state computer we had was an IBM 1460 with 16k of memory. I can hardly remember any of the details of those days. My brain is losing it's short term memory also, and I can't remember names of people or things very well lately. I can be talking and can't recall a certain word that I know the meaning of but just can't recall it. I sure hope I don't lose my ability to think, as I told my wife, as long as I can remember how to get back home I'll be OK.

  Ken P.
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  one

  PRIME COMPUTERS?
  a pain in the neck
  went to Boston for trainning and installed some for a major bank

  tubes?
  even remember klystron tubes, not the kind you want to play with
  25kv repeller voltage 8 amp talking about 200kw mostly wasted power,
  water/vapor cooled

  how about magnetic memony,

  how about trs-80 from radio shack,
  5 or 8 inch disks
  took years to compile cobol
  even used regular audio cassete for storage, 1200 bps retrival