On Thu, 6 Aug 2015, Dave G4UGM wrote:
Booting an old CDC 6000-series machine meant mounting a "deadstart"
tape, pushing the button just below the screens on the DD60, entering or
editing the equipment status table, then going out for a smoke (not me) or a
cup of coffee, while the system copied the deadstart tape to disk.
The next prompt was to enter the date and time.
People are too impatient today.
--Chuck
Actually I remember booting an IBM4381 from cold after we shut it down over
Christmas. Just pressing the Power button powered it up eventually, but I am
pretty sure it took nearly an hour to get to the IPL prompt. So it did disk
drives, then tape drives, then other bits and bobs. But when it spun up the
disks it brought them up one at a time so the startup surges didn't trip the
main breaker. The same with the tape drives. Then it loaded the microcode into
all the controllers. Then it booted the OS. As we were running VM this last bit
took a few seconds (I think). I do know if VM crashed you screen logo
frequently re-appeared before you had time to think.
Spinning off on this tangent, when I was learning how to fire up my Sun
E10k I didn't realise it took so ruddy long for the SSP and the E10k to
speak to each other.
So I was constantly asking the SSP for the E10k's power status (to see if
they were communicating) and being told the SSP "wasn't the master".
I'd powered things up repeatedly and made all sorts of changes to the SSP
config and just couldn't figure out what wasn't working. So one day I'm
messing with it again and I'd walked over to the other side of the shop
for a manual and gotten distracted and maybe ten minuted passed and all of
a sudden all of the blowers dropped RPM and evened out. The SSP and E10k
had finally finished their secret masonic handshake and the SSP did the
equivalent of "Hey, dude, it's not 7000 degrees in here, you can chillax
now".
"People are too impatient today" -- Chuck G
True enough. I just didn't know enough to know I should be patient.
- JP
