On 2016-05-25 10:43 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
The train printers did have an obvious advantage over both the drum
and band printers. In our shop, we printed lots and lots of core
dumps. Add to a full CM dump, a couple of million words of ECS and the
"0" characters wore out pretty quickly. You could replace a train
slug, but had to live with "fuzzy" zeroes until someone higher up
couldn't stand the printout. I recall reading a set of pre-publication
Univac 1108 manuals that were printed on a badly-adjusted drum
printer. It gave me headaches. --Chuck
Speaking of dumps I remember an engineer friend telling me that at the
university that he went to they had a CDC Cyber system and they
discovered that you could initiate a dump from any workstation, and the
system would dump out to the printer and while it was dumping the whole
system came to a halt.... guess what the students where fond of
doing...... It would seem to me that something like that should have
been more restricted.
In the first couple years of working as an electronic technician, we
still had software people in the branch office, and I remember being
blown away by this one guy. He came into the office with a MVS dump
which was a 6-8 inch stack of paper and on the top of each was a header
with the IAR and register contents when the system trapped. He looks at
the IAR and digs into the dump to find that address and then he starts
working backwards, unassembling the instructions in his head and after a
few minutes he points to a spot in the dump and says "yes there it is,
there is where it started to go wrong"
Paul.
