Maybe. Obviously, a drum could have the advantage of being non-volatile, ie staying magnetized when someone pulls the big red switch. I never dealt with any of those systems that had to be very high availability, but I'd guess NASA did. I recall hearing that the airline systems would get rebooted 200 times per day. (So don't say that Windows hasn't matched the reliability of those old systems) This indicates that they had fairly fast ways to recover what needed to be recovered and get back up and running. A drum might have been the way to go for quick reboots long after it was obsoleted for main memory, which IIRC was pretty much all magnetic donuts at that time. The 370's (which came out at the end of 1970) had semiconductor memory in some models, but magnets in others.
The 370's also had something like a floppy somewhere deep inside, from which their instruction set got loaded. If NASA was doing bleeding-edge research on the model 91, then maybe they would be messing with the instruction set, trying to find ways to use the parallelism, etc. Might the instruction set or parts of it have been on that drum?
I started computing in 1967 and never saw a drum, but I worked with many who had used them on the old model 650 in the 1950's. This was the first business computer that IBM sold to many large bank/insurance type firms at that time. The 360/91 was one of the very largest and fastest models of the 360's about a decade later, and I doubt it had a drum for any of its main storage, as it was so fast. The IBM 360's were supposed roughly compatible and consistent all up and down the product line (not 100%, but at least they tried), but the Model 91 broke some of the rules at the high end -- much of IBM's software had special flags that had to be set to make it work on a 91. It was so fast that it introduced 'imprecise interrupts', ie it couldn't tell you what statement had caused an error, because it might be doing several things at once or be a few statements further along before it noticed a problem. This was a machine that could do stuff in a microsecond, ie one of the first that would actually do something like 1 MIPS. There were only about a half dozen of these things made, some universities, NASA, and similar operations. UCLA had one, but Caltech had to get by with a little model 75. There were stories of bigger 360's, a model 95 or model 195 that existed somewhere, but IDK where or for what.
Back in the 650 days, memory was on a spinning drum. Good programmers were those who could organize their programs and memory so that the part of the drum that was currently accessible was the part that held the data that was currently needed. It was like juggling.
Some of this carried over into later areas with disks. I knew a guy who optimized his disk accesses (using the physical IO instructions) all the way up until the 4341 generation (around 1980), so that his programs could read the disks as fast as they spun.
The magnetic strip machines were called 'data cells', and they were top drawer technology in the late 1960's. All the very ambitious programs for randomly accessing big piles of data seemed to use them. But accessing the data involved having an arm pull the right strip out of a container, wrap it around a drum, read it and write it there, then put it back into its container. The mag were strips were subject to wear, and when worn, they didn't behave predictably, and they would get jammed up.
The console does not look like a 360-era IBM machine, likely a previous generation. Is it 7070, 7007, 7094, 650, or what?
Everything else does appear circa 1969-1970. There's a Frieden calculator from 1970 on top of one of the cabinets in one of the pictures of the disk farm, I think.
What is the programming language shown with the "DATA" statement? Based
on the line numbers and qualified names, I'm guessing RUSH (remote use of shared hardware), which was IBM's timesharing cross between Basic and PL/1 that was briefly popular in that era.
aT 500 Mb, Those are 2311 type packs. They were
obsolete by the time I got in the machine room in
1970. They were succeeded by 2314's, which could
hold 14 Mb. Later, a dual density 2314 that could
do 28 Mb came along.
Does Bush's position as Commander in Chief make him a combatant and a legit target of the enemy? If not, why not? If so, is he not an 'illegal combatant', since he is usually wearing neither uniform nor conspicuous insignia?
One FTE can support 250K lines of code. Based on that, you can take a guess at relative cost of outside support vs doing support in-house. Then factor in the acquisition costs. Problem is that no vendor can give you a fixed price on a 10-year support contract that's worth a pitcher of warm anything. They'll be bankrupt, out-of-business, moved to a different continent, or mentally insane by then. If you are sure you need to support an app for ten years, you gotta pay the price of owning it end-to-end. If this functionality is important to you but not worth 0.1 FTE, then it's not important to you. Don't bother me with trivia. Ask us about something important, like how the new governor is gonna outsource your butts anyway.
When a Republican, Teddy Roosevelt was once attempting to give a speech, but was repeatedly interrupted by a vociferous opponent shouting "I'm a Democrat." Roosevelt lost patience and deviated from his text to ask the heckler, "Why are you a Democrat?"
"Because my father was a Democrat and his father was a Democrat."
"If your father was a jackass and his father was a jackass, would you want to be a jackass?"
Why all my audio equipment starts losing a channel intermittently when it gets old? Seems to happen first with phono input, then the other inputs start picking up the symptom too. Cranking up the volume will usually cause the lost channel to come crashing back to life.
The Mason-Dixon line, when extended eastward, divides New Jersey. There used to be a truck stop in NJ on one of the main roads just south of the line. Confederate flags and all of that stuff around. The worst of both worlds -- chitluns, hocks and hominy, NJ style, served by a NJ waitress.
Living there is so weird that once you've gotten used to it, you will believe nothing and everything. Belief becomes a fairly meaningless concept in several ways.
It is something of a tragedy that a state as populous as NJ doesn't have just about any local broadcast industry anymore. Getting signals from Boston is not any worse than the steady diet of NYC and Philadelphia programming that NJ residents must endure. Everyone who grows up there has sort of a builtin inferiority complex from living in a state with virtually no TV, no media of its own, coming from a place that doesn't even recognize itself except as the place where Hoffa is buried. This being the state where RCA developed much of TV, and where Armstrong built the first FM broadcast station, it's a shame. And you can't even get out of the state without paying a toll.
See comp.risks from a couple of weeks back. Digital TV receivers are causing interference with digital cellphones within a couple of rooms of the TV set. This is a way to protect the TV stations from unwanted competition, as most of the dialogue on cellphones is funnier than anything on TV.
Speaking of funny, law enforcement in NJ probably fits that category. Back in Hudson County, the police used to get extra pay when their duty was to guard the bootleggers' beer pipeline. I once almost got thrown in the hoosegow for slander because I had asked a fellow if he was the police chief. He was. He didn't like the insinuation. The feds had just raided the various organized crime locations doing vice in his locale and had made sure that he knew nothing about it until after the mafiosos were locked up.
And it's not like these cops are just into big-money crime like drugs, gambling, and vice; they'll work with the local muggers and burglars to tip them about where your valuables are and what days you have the most cash in your till. Saddest place I ever lived.
Anyway, it's sad how many kids in NJ would like to marry mafia money.
Actually, back in the 1960's, NJ had one of the first gas stations with topless female gas pumpers; it was on the approach to the GW Bridge, where the gas business was very competitive. This did nothing to improve the state's reputation, for reasons that were obvious to those who saw what a bust it was.
Anyway, since the WTC is down, the plan now is to build a 600-meter mast in NJ near the Statue of Liberty and have all the NYC area stations broadcast from there. So, NJ could retaliate pretty good. If they broadcast pictures of those NJ topless gas pumpers back to Boston, the New Englanders would be demoralized and surrender ASAP!
It's true about NJ mosquitoes. They've adapted and actually are attracted to mosquito repellant. When a busload of tourists comes to the Jersey Shore from NYC loaded with mosquito repellent, the mosquitoes go into such a frenzy that they actually bite the picture of the greyhound on the side of the bus. Within a few hours, the bus is so swollen that it can't fit back through the Lincoln Tunnel.
Icemen were 95% obsoleted by the availability of refrigerators and freezers around 1925. But they didn't disappear entirely. They still operated routes in US cities until around 1970, servicing firms that hadn't converted their infrastructure. Hell, you can still buy a big bag of ice at the grocery store if you don't want to make it at home. But commercial ice is much smaller business relative to the economy than it was in 1920.
Timesharing is 95% obsoleted by the availability of cheap PC's and networks. It makes sense to do without the big iron and rent it when you need it only if you don't need it often. But for the occasional need, the overhead of making the connection, establishing both business and data interchange relationships with the vendor, getting the data to and from the remote computer, and getting everything working smoothly is very ugly. If they are selling me the same generic service that they are selling to my competitor, that's no competitive advantage to me, and I surely don't want to let them know about all the specialized custom computing that I do that gives my firm a competitive advantage.
The irresistable combination of commercial supercomputing, time sharing, and web services -- if you've got a trifecta ticket in your pocket with those names on it, you're on your way.
Back about 10 years ago, the New York Times did a piece on a firm of lawyers in Texas that was particularly (ie vicious and nasty) respected because they could put anyone away with their particularly hard-hitting tactics, like depositioning the executives of a software firn to death while their business went to hell. The firm's initials were B & B. They developed these tactics about transfers of software to other firms in various deals. A certain insurance company had licensed software from a big software company. The insurance company got into financial trouble, divested some subsidiaries, and then outsourced its data center to a firm that was not the author of the insurance system running in the data center. B & B showed up representing the company that marketed the system and sued. During the trial, the people who had 'written' the system testified that they had copied it directly from a system put into the public domain by IBM, but B&B managed to 'win' the case by forcing both the insurance company and their data center outsourcer to surrender under the legal onslaught.
If I get a prescription for some of my personal hygiene needs (for tax and insurance purposes), and go to a MegaMegaMart Pharmacy to buy them, and carry them to the cash register, and the checkout clerk gets on the public address and hollers "PRICE CHECK ON _use_your_imagination_here_, GIANT ECONOMY SIZE" again, can I sue?
Unfortunately, MS sees HIPAA as a big marketing opportunity. If you've got to replace or upgrade everything to comply, why not go with the firm with the biggest market share? The responsible authorities are not going to shoot everyone who buys from MS, no matter how badly MS might mung it up. But they might shoot everyone who buys from some small operator, just to show that enforcement exists, given that compliance is impossible. MS is investing much in offering some ways to attempt HIPAA compliance via it's.NET smokeandmirrorsware, so this isn't going to hurt them much.
It takes people like MS to make people like linux, just as it takes people like health insurers to make people like undertakers.
That's not all. If you disclose any data, you
must be able to comply with requests from the subject to tell the subject what was disclosed when and to whom for up to six years later. This means that if you ship something with a label on it that says "Handle with Care -- Prosthesis", and the UPS people see the label, you should be able to let the patient to whom you shipped know this for up to six years later. Very onerous.
They haven't yet pronounced whether HIPAA prohibits doctors offices from using sign-in sheets, for example. This is a disclosure to each person signing in who the other patients are. After all, you can see them in the office and might recognize them, so how can it be a violation of 'privacy'? But it's exactly the kind of promiscuous disclosure that this act is supposed to prevent. The law is an ass.
The old big-iron IBM's had ways to prevent all these silly hardware errors -- things like 'Branch on chad box full' and 'Eject typeball if not Cyrillic'. And fire on big, fast, printers was a significant risk back in those days.
Windows NT has done soemthing similar when it couldn't find the mouse. A message box pops up, but you can't reply without a mouse. The 'O' on the 'OK' button is not hot-keyed.
Lieberman is a Democrat from CT. His state is loaded with corporate HQ's, and this distorts his thinking somewhat.
During the boom market, the idea that the stock market could solve the big problems of Social Security after 2017 was rampant among politicians. More among Republicans, but many Democrats were in there, too. Lieberman was also among the politicians pressuring the Financial Accounting Standards Board to not require that corporate accounting be too closely connected to reality, and the rules have been loosened to the point where misleading accounting (fraud or artifice) that is illegal post-Enron is also just about mandatory according to FASB rules. No one wanted the SEC or FASB to do anything that might cause the stock market to stop ignoring the facts.
We may be getting more honest financial statements post-Enron, now that CEO's have to certify them, but they are only more honestly dishonest. CEO's aren't accountants and the accounting rules are so far through the looking glass that the accounting statements tell us just about nothing. The whole purpose of the system is to keep the suckers in the pews of the church of capitalism, investing so that the market god says we're prosperous and the suckers should be happy. Lieberman is part of the system.
The excess of characters exists because these were thought up to control hardware, ie printers. The 0A character is a linefeed. It tells the printer to advance the paper vertically one line. On some printers, it did not change the print position (ie the column), The 0D character is the carriage return. It tells the printer to return the print position to the left margin (what it does for right-to-left languages, IDK). The CR could be used to overstrike print, because it does not cause vertical motion of the print position or paper.
0D + 0A equals what has to happen at the end of a normal line when printing on one of these character printers. Why is the 0D usually first? Because it often took longer for the print head to move all the way across to the left margin than it did to advance the paper one line. Printers could do the linefeed (0A) while the carriage return was already in progress without waiting for the carriage return to complete -- producing a net increase of speed on slow printers. Mechanical typewriters did the linefeed first, so that you could save time by interrupting the carriage return before it was completed when you wanted to print indented text.
Slashdot Mirror
The 370's also had something like a floppy somewhere deep inside, from which their instruction set got loaded. If NASA was doing bleeding-edge research on the model 91, then maybe they would be messing with the instruction set, trying to find ways to use the parallelism, etc. Might the instruction set or parts of it have been on that drum?
I started computing in 1967 and never saw a drum, but I worked with many who had used them on the old model 650 in the 1950's. This was the first business computer that IBM sold to many large bank/insurance type firms at that time. The 360/91 was one of the very largest and fastest models of the 360's about a decade later, and I doubt it had a drum for any of its main storage, as it was so fast. The IBM 360's were supposed roughly compatible and consistent all up and down the product line (not 100%, but at least they tried), but the Model 91 broke some of the rules at the high end -- much of IBM's software had special flags that had to be set to make it work on a 91. It was so fast that it introduced 'imprecise interrupts', ie it couldn't tell you what statement had caused an error, because it might be doing several things at once or be a few statements further along before it noticed a problem. This was a machine that could do stuff in a microsecond, ie one of the first that would actually do something like 1 MIPS. There were only about a half dozen of these things made, some universities, NASA, and similar operations. UCLA had one, but Caltech had to get by with a little model 75. There were stories of bigger 360's, a model 95 or model 195 that existed somewhere, but IDK where or for what.
Some of this carried over into later areas with disks. I knew a guy who optimized his disk accesses (using the physical IO instructions) all the way up until the 4341 generation (around 1980), so that his programs could read the disks as fast as they spun.
The magnetic strip machines were called 'data cells', and they were top drawer technology in the late 1960's. All the very ambitious programs for randomly accessing big piles of data seemed to use them. But accessing the data involved having an arm pull the right strip out of a container, wrap it around a drum, read it and write it there, then put it back into its container. The mag were strips were subject to wear, and when worn, they didn't behave predictably, and they would get jammed up.
Everything else does appear circa 1969-1970. There's a Frieden calculator from 1970 on top of one of the cabinets in one of the pictures of the disk farm, I think.
What is the programming language shown with the "DATA" statement? Based on the line numbers and qualified names, I'm guessing RUSH (remote use of shared hardware), which was IBM's timesharing cross between Basic and PL/1 that was briefly popular in that era.
aT 500 Mb, Those are 2311 type packs. They were obsolete by the time I got in the machine room in 1970. They were succeeded by 2314's, which could hold 14 Mb. Later, a dual density 2314 that could do 28 Mb came along.
Our functions may be complex, but are our poles simple?
Does Bush's position as Commander in Chief make him a combatant and a legit target of the enemy? If not, why not? If so, is he not an 'illegal combatant', since he is usually wearing neither uniform nor conspicuous insignia?
One FTE can support 250K lines of code. Based on that, you can take a guess at relative cost of outside support vs doing support in-house. Then factor in the acquisition costs. Problem is that no vendor can give you a fixed price on a 10-year support contract that's worth a pitcher of warm anything. They'll be bankrupt, out-of-business, moved to a different continent, or mentally insane by then. If you are sure you need to support an app for ten years, you gotta pay the price of owning it end-to-end. If this functionality is important to you but not worth 0.1 FTE, then it's not important to you. Don't bother me with trivia. Ask us about something important, like how the new governor is gonna outsource your butts anyway.
When a Republican, Teddy Roosevelt was once attempting to give a speech, but was repeatedly interrupted by a vociferous opponent shouting "I'm a Democrat." Roosevelt lost patience and deviated from his text to ask the heckler, "Why are you a Democrat?"
"Because my father was a Democrat and his father was a Democrat."
"If your father was a jackass and his father was a jackass, would you want to be a jackass?"
"No, I'd be a Republican."
Why all my audio equipment starts losing a channel intermittently when it gets old? Seems to happen first with phono input, then the other inputs start picking up the symptom too. Cranking up the volume will usually cause the lost channel to come crashing back to life.
The Mason-Dixon line, when extended eastward, divides New Jersey. There used to be a truck stop in NJ on one of the main roads just south of the line. Confederate flags and all of that stuff around. The worst of both worlds -- chitluns, hocks and hominy, NJ style, served by a NJ waitress.
Living there is so weird that once you've gotten used to it, you will believe nothing and everything. Belief becomes a fairly meaningless concept in several ways.
It is something of a tragedy that a state as populous as NJ doesn't have just about any local broadcast industry anymore. Getting signals from Boston is not any worse than the steady diet of NYC and Philadelphia programming that NJ residents must endure. Everyone who grows up there has sort of a builtin inferiority complex from living in a state with virtually no TV, no media of its own, coming from a place that doesn't even recognize itself except as the place where Hoffa is buried. This being the state where RCA developed much of TV, and where Armstrong built the first FM broadcast station, it's a shame. And you can't even get out of the state without paying a toll.
Speaking of funny, law enforcement in NJ probably fits that category. Back in Hudson County, the police used to get extra pay when their duty was to guard the bootleggers' beer pipeline. I once almost got thrown in the hoosegow for slander because I had asked a fellow if he was the police chief. He was. He didn't like the insinuation. The feds had just raided the various organized crime locations doing vice in his locale and had made sure that he knew nothing about it until after the mafiosos were locked up.
And it's not like these cops are just into big-money crime like drugs, gambling, and vice; they'll work with the local muggers and burglars to tip them about where your valuables are and what days you have the most cash in your till. Saddest place I ever lived.
Anyway, it's sad how many kids in NJ would like to marry mafia money.
Anyway, since the WTC is down, the plan now is to build a 600-meter mast in NJ near the Statue of Liberty and have all the NYC area stations broadcast from there. So, NJ could retaliate pretty good. If they broadcast pictures of those NJ topless gas pumpers back to Boston, the New Englanders would be demoralized and surrender ASAP!
It's true about NJ mosquitoes. They've adapted and actually are attracted to mosquito repellant. When a busload of tourists comes to the Jersey Shore from NYC loaded with mosquito repellent, the mosquitoes go into such a frenzy that they actually bite the picture of the greyhound on the side of the bus. Within a few hours, the bus is so swollen that it can't fit back through the Lincoln Tunnel.
Timesharing is 95% obsoleted by the availability of cheap PC's and networks. It makes sense to do without the big iron and rent it when you need it only if you don't need it often. But for the occasional need, the overhead of making the connection, establishing both business and data interchange relationships with the vendor, getting the data to and from the remote computer, and getting everything working smoothly is very ugly. If they are selling me the same generic service that they are selling to my competitor, that's no competitive advantage to me, and I surely don't want to let them know about all the specialized custom computing that I do that gives my firm a competitive advantage.
The irresistable combination of commercial supercomputing, time sharing, and web services -- if you've got a trifecta ticket in your pocket with those names on it, you're on your way.
Back about 10 years ago, the New York Times did a piece on a firm of lawyers in Texas that was particularly (ie vicious and nasty) respected because they could put anyone away with their particularly hard-hitting tactics, like depositioning the executives of a software firn to death while their business went to hell. The firm's initials were B & B. They developed these tactics about transfers of software to other firms in various deals. A certain insurance company had licensed software from a big software company. The insurance company got into financial trouble, divested some subsidiaries, and then outsourced its data center to a firm that was not the author of the insurance system running in the data center. B & B showed up representing the company that marketed the system and sued. During the trial, the people who had 'written' the system testified that they had copied it directly from a system put into the public domain by IBM, but B&B managed to 'win' the case by forcing both the insurance company and their data center outsourcer to surrender under the legal onslaught.
If I get a prescription for some of my personal hygiene needs (for tax and insurance purposes), and go to a MegaMegaMart Pharmacy to buy them, and carry them to the cash register, and the checkout clerk gets on the public address and hollers "PRICE CHECK ON _use_your_imagination_here_, GIANT ECONOMY SIZE" again, can I sue?
That's a good way to keep MS from automatically updating your software without telling you.
It takes people like MS to make people like linux, just as it takes people like health insurers to make people like undertakers.
They haven't yet pronounced whether HIPAA prohibits doctors offices from using sign-in sheets, for example. This is a disclosure to each person signing in who the other patients are. After all, you can see them in the office and might recognize them, so how can it be a violation of 'privacy'? But it's exactly the kind of promiscuous disclosure that this act is supposed to prevent. The law is an ass.
The old big-iron IBM's had ways to prevent all these silly hardware errors -- things like 'Branch on chad box full' and 'Eject typeball if not Cyrillic'. And fire on big, fast, printers was a significant risk back in those days.
Windows NT has done soemthing similar when it couldn't find the mouse. A message box pops up, but you can't reply without a mouse. The 'O' on the 'OK' button is not hot-keyed.
During the boom market, the idea that the stock market could solve the big problems of Social Security after 2017 was rampant among politicians. More among Republicans, but many Democrats were in there, too. Lieberman was also among the politicians pressuring the Financial Accounting Standards Board to not require that corporate accounting be too closely connected to reality, and the rules have been loosened to the point where misleading accounting (fraud or artifice) that is illegal post-Enron is also just about mandatory according to FASB rules. No one wanted the SEC or FASB to do anything that might cause the stock market to stop ignoring the facts.
We may be getting more honest financial statements post-Enron, now that CEO's have to certify them, but they are only more honestly dishonest. CEO's aren't accountants and the accounting rules are so far through the looking glass that the accounting statements tell us just about nothing. The whole purpose of the system is to keep the suckers in the pews of the church of capitalism, investing so that the market god says we're prosperous and the suckers should be happy. Lieberman is part of the system.
0D + 0A equals what has to happen at the end of a normal line when printing on one of these character printers. Why is the 0D usually first? Because it often took longer for the print head to move all the way across to the left margin than it did to advance the paper one line. Printers could do the linefeed (0A) while the carriage return was already in progress without waiting for the carriage return to complete -- producing a net increase of speed on slow printers. Mechanical typewriters did the linefeed first, so that you could save time by interrupting the carriage return before it was completed when you wanted to print indented text.