[rescue] IBM Mainframe fun

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Tue, 21 Jun 2005 @ 17:29 +0300, Geoffrey S. Mendelson said:

> On Tue, Jun 21, 2005 at 09:10:30AM -0500, Bill Bradford wrote:
> > On Tue, Jun 21, 2005 at 10:31:40AM +0200, Jochen Kunz wrote:
> > > > http://www.mrbill.net/hercules.jpg
> > > Where to get that nice background image?
> > 
> > images.google.com search for system370 AFAIR.  Or I can just uplaod it 
> > somewhere. 8-)
> 
> The irony of it all is that I tried it when the fastest machine I had
> was a PII 600mHz. It was faster than the "big iron" when MVS 3.8
> was current. 
> 
> It's also amazing how far we have come since then. I was a big CMS fan,
> but I completely forgot that you had flat "disks" (no subdirectories)
> and you could only have 26 of them.

Well, you could create partitioned data sets, though to me they felt
more like "libraries" than directories.

I still have my last JCL book around here somewhere.

It's for MVS/XA.  I wish I could get that running on Hercules.

Of course, it would just be a big time sink right now.

> The disk drives one place I worked at had at the time were 3350's,
> which had 2.5 gig per string of 8 (the picture below is six of
> them). They had 13 strings of 8 in one room (104 drives), almost the
> capacity of a large iPod. :-)

I remember in college we had a 3270 cluster, across the river there was
a 370 running DOS/VE and MUSIC, and then a 4381 in Richmond, VA.

When programming the 4381, we had a 256MB drive, and I could not believe
how huge it was.  The 4381 itself only had about 32MB of RAM, though it
did get upgraded.

There are ways in which the mainframes are more interesting than the
stuff I ended up working with.  The primary problem in college was the
highly limited access, which kept you from being able to learn much
about them.


-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["It's a damn poor mind that can only think
of one way to spell a word." -- Andrew Jackson]