It was Oct 3, 2000, 10:42, when Austin L. Denyer keyboarded:
>Strike one for bloatware, I agree. I once set up a 50-user stock control
>system running on a low-end 486 with 16Mb RAM with Novel NetWare 3.12...
I know about that too. And indeed. Netware 3.12 would run on that, but not
on much less.
>We had a similar machine to yours at the college I was at. It was almost
>embarrassingly easy to hack. I remember one kid who was most unpopular (for
>good reason), who happened to be blighted with a bad case of acne. Someone
>modified his project so that, on running, it printed a plethora of comments
>suggesting a visual similarity between his countenance and the topping of a
>'House Special' pizza #;-D
Hehehe. Yes, these old boxes really had no protection at all to hackers
and crackers. But in those days, before 1980, there was not much fear of
things like that happening. (Resident hackers in training excepted of
course ;)
>At one of the places I used to work we used to have an old PRIME dinosaur.
>This was the size of a small family car, and had the performance of a
>mid-range 386 (blisteringly fast in it's time!). All word-processing and
>spreadsheet work for 300 users used to be done on it, as well as CAD!
>However, as the software grew, it got to the stage that a page-down on a
>spreadsheet took (perhaps conveniently!) approximately the same length of
>time as a trip to the coffee machine...
I think I know what you mean. I have used a Prime machine too. It was not
that slow, it was actually the first Unix machine I got my hands on. That
is what started my fascination with Unix.
>It was in it's own air-conditioned room, protected with the most evil halon
>fire-extinguisher system I'd ever seen. (If the ceiling tiles started to
>fly, you had about 5 seconds to get out of the room before you
>suffocated...)
Yup. Been there, done that. Because some failure triggered the halon
system to go off. Man, did I have a rotten time for some days!!
>But, the mother of them all was the CICS mainframe. This was the size of my
>apartment, with valves (ObTeenager - glass vacuum tubes that functioned as
>transistors!) and was WATER-COOLED!!!! Believe it or not, we only retired
>it six years ago! This ran a basic MRP system, written in a horrible
>mixture of COBOL and FORTRAN.
Hahaha!! At the main office of my work they have something like that still
in action!! Next to an IBM S/370. (Did you know there is a linux port for
the S/370 out??? Yay!)
The CICS machine is programmed mainly in Fortran 66 (they lost the tape
with Fortran 77) and assembler. We're working very hard to cross-compile
the code from the CICS to the big IBM as much as possible, but it still
takes a helluva lot of handwork. Most code is so old and crumpled that we
decided it's better to redo the assembler programs in clean Cobol, and
patch up the Fortran 66 code to Fortran 77 as we go.
>> On the IBM we had been messing so much that not much of the executable
>> code had any bearing to its source code. Usually we'd patch the hex code
>> directly in memory and dump that back to disk. Using an 8 bit switch array
>> on the machine itself. Such fun!! ;)
>
>I remember being insanely jealous of the guys who could toggle in the
>bootstrap code without touching the manual...
I could only do the first 64 switch sequences ;-)
Paul
--
Q: Why did witches stop flying on brooms?
A: Splinters...
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