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Old Computers Exhibit

Posted by michael on from the fanfold-paper dept.

prostoalex writes "Arthur Lavine was working for Chase Manhattan bank as a principal photographer. Computer Museum runs an exhibit of Arthur Lavine's photographs of old computer and data processing equipment. Fifteen black-and-white photos from the era where computers were still heading for 1.5 ton benchmark."

7 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. It's true! by nutznboltz · · Score: 3, Interesting

    A Sun 15K only weighs 1.2 tons!

  2. Some stories... by powerlinekid · · Score: 5, Interesting

    To go along with the pictures... I was wondering if any of our more experienced /.ers have any stories about these machines? I personally have never seen one up close but I'm sure that alot of us younger folks would love to hear about the quirks of these giants. Thanks in advance.

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    can't sleep slashdot will eat me
    1. Re:Some stories... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Ahhhh....what the photos don't show.

      The temperature in those rooms was about 70F with very low humidity so the punch cards and paper wouldn't expand and jam the readers and printers. So wearing a jacket wasn't really a hardship...

      Then of course those were the days before indoor smoking was banned. You couldn't smoke in the machine rooms but anywhere else was fine.

      And let's not forget the rooms full of keypunch operators, 100% all American, female high school graduates. At my first job out of college (1975 they outnumbered us single, male, well paid ($10,500) college boys 5 to 1.

      Yep, those were the days...

    2. Re:Some stories... by bob · · Score: 5, Interesting

      They were a pain in the ass. Consider:

      • The edit/compile/run cycle could take hours. I worked as a contractor at NASA Goddard in the early 1980s and we still had couriers that would run around from building to building, picking up card decks to run and dropping off the run card decks with their printouts. You actually spent hours sometimes pouring over hex core dumps because that was faster and less expensive than just trying things on a hunch to see if they worked.
      • Proper procedure was that you wrote your program out, by hand, on 80-column "coding forms", which were 8.5"x11" paper tablets with green lines and shading and numbers and stuff. There were little boxes where you would print each character to be punched. Theoretically, these were designed so that you could hand them to a keypunch operator, but I never had a job where we could afford this -- you just punched them yourself. You still used the forms, however, because in some cases you'd have to wait in line for a turn at a keypunch. They made cabinets with special drawers to hold punch cards. When someone left a job, the remaining people would bicker over who got his drawers.
      • Since persistent, cataloged disk space was so scarce, the more important measure of your space allocation was the number of hanger slots you had in the tape library. You'd get strips with number codes that you would insert in the plastic band around the 9-track reel, and then go hang them in the library (other sites I worked at made you hand them to the tape librarian). You might put a dozen or more files on a tape and then you'd have to remember how many tape marks to skip to get to the one you wanted. Standard labeled tapes were evil.
        Anyway, You'd code the slot number on in the JCL DD statement and when your job was run, the operator would have to scurry over to tape library to pull it off the rack, mount it on the drive, and push the acknowledge button on the console. Before they needed the tape drive again they'd pull your tape and hang it on the "ready rack"; if that tape was called up again they'd have it right there. But if you went over to pick up your tape shortly after your job ran, you'd often have to ask them to "check the ready rack", or, in the case of NASA Goddard, you could often walk over to the console and yank your tape off the ready rack yourself.
      • I had one long-running linear least squares job that we could only run on standby. This meant that you'd submit a card deck to a special bin that could take days to empty. Late at night, after all the paying jobs were run, if there was time left in the operator's shift they'd load one of these jobs and let it run, for free, until the morning shift if necessary. This one particular job would crash in random places, and I was weeks pouring over crash dumps, even resorting to my own special little bit map that I'd use to indicate program status and progress at the point it crashed. Nothing did any good, crashes were completely random. A co-worker, more experienced than I, took a look at it, saw that it was mounting a tape and the tape always got put on the same drive. He told me to rubber-band a note on the deck to the operator, telling him to take that tape drive offline before running the job. It ran to completion that night for the first time.
      • At a later job, the company I worked for used a timesharing service. We rented a whole disk pack, which seemed kind of extravagant but was in fact cost-effective given their pricing structure. This was a removable pack and it was kept offline most of the time, and was mounted when needed by a job. There were two ways to manage that space. You could simply code the pack's ID into the JCL and then access files through the on-pack catalog, or you could enter the files into the mainframe's master catalog. Generally, I preferred doing the latter, but I think I was about the only customer they had that did, because as I recall it caused all manner of problems for the operators.

      BTW, I believe it was NASA's IBM 360/91 that I remember having drum storage for virtual memory storage. A drum was sort of like a disk drive except it was a cylinder with the magnetic material on the outside surface. Some drums, I think, had heads that moved up and down to read separate tracks, but this one had a long row of heads from top to bottom, reading the tracks in parallel. But I could be remembering it wrong. Anyone else remember these?

    3. Re:Some stories... by panurge · · Score: 3, Interesting
      This is embarrassing but true...
      The first day on site, I was given a pad and told to go find all of the tapes, make a list of the numbers and locations. It was a big department, but even so after 2 hours I still had a lot of gaps. Eventually I went back to my supervisor with the list, and explained that I couldn't find any tapes with an 8 or 9 in the numbers.

      "That's because they're numbered in octal" she crowed. I can still remember feeling my ears go red - but I had learnt my way around on the first morning, which was the object of this bit of ritual humiliation of newbies.

      --
      Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
    4. Re:Some stories... by octalgirl · · Score: 3, Interesting

      First, although the photos are in black&white and look pretty old, remember that those systems were still in heavy use right through the 80's and some even into the 90's before Y2K finally freaked everyone out enough to move on replacing them. Florida's election last year with a bunch of retired, poor eye sighted ppl trying to look at all those little chads on an 80-column punch card! My eyes hurt just thinking about it. (just a disclaimer so I don't age myself tooo much)

      Anyway, one of my worst was the first time I did the old 'Del *.*' on the root of a PDP. I thought I was in my own directory. Good thing I was also responsible for the backups and restores. There was a team coming in to use the lab in a couple of hours so I had to run and grab the old reel tape and do a restore. I was so panicked but I made it. These were 24 hour shops because you didn't power this kind of equipment down, so I would always take the Thanksgiving shift (at triple pay) with a skeleton crew. We would bring in Turkey and champagne with everything else and party and feast all day. You could drink and smoke just about anywhere except for right next to the equipment. I remember a water sprinkler busting and flooding a lab, a fire another time that closed us up for two weeks. Counting in octal - ha! Does anyone ever do that anymore? Moving on, I remember using the Internet before there was a 'Web' to get to technical companies to look for know problems, issues. I remember using Kermit to dial into 3Com in the 286 days to get an updated driver - it took 2 days! Or how about stuffing Windows 3.1, WordPerfect 5.1, and a printer driver all on one bootable 31/2 disk? Boy, I could go on....

      Unlike the steep competitive of today, those days were truly special. Great people, great times - the epitome of a true team spirit. To me it was a wondrous era, followed by yet another wondrous era that we have today, with desktop computing and the Internet - truly amazing stuff. That's why I get so miffed at groups like the RIAA and silly patents, and broadband ISPs whining about downloading and using bandwidth, about bad laws like the DMCA and elected officials and everyone just trying to jump on some bandwagon that they missed years ago. That's why I come here, so I can keep up to date on this crap and try and do something about it. I see technology on a precipice now. It can fall into the hands of greedy commercial corporations, or remain open and public so it can enter its next truly wondrous era.

  3. Re:Lab Rats by octalgirl · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Oh dear - I started as computer operator. That was the most high-tech job available back then, next to programming of course. And it was often 'women's work'. (It was my experience that programmers were mostly women too cause most guys wouldn't be caught dead in front of a keyboard, [but they built the keyboards and mainframes] but that's for another thread) Of course 'computer' meant a large room full of mainframes. Tapes, cards, maintenance, backups, etc. Those vax disks pictured - ours were only 10MB, and you needed carts to move them around. Just look at those pictures again - that giant box with huge round platter drive on it- to hold 10 MB - so to get 100 MB you needed a room full of disk drives! An 8088 that was coming out right around the same time also had a 10MB drive. What a difference. Had to count in octal (thus my silly nick) cause the 32 bits were on the outside of some units - 0s and 1s - you pressed them in to turn them on. There are many things and many friends I wish I could have had photos of, but since 12 yrs of that time were in secret labs working for DoD, cameras weren't allowed.

    Octal - aka 'The Lab Rat'