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30 Years Since The First IBM PC


ggm1960

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My first non-mainframe corporate database implementation, was Oracle on OS/2 on Compaq Proliant servers in the early 90's. Was also my first non-mainframe experience. We had no unix environment and Windows NT was called Not There (which it wasn't). OS/2 was rock solid, I don't recall a single OS related outage. We later moved to unix (AIX), but avoided Windows; we had one 3rd party package that had to run on Windows and it was never as stable.

 

OS/2 was IMHO a superior OS, but was killed by IBM's usual talent for poor marketing and the fact that there were few applications written for it; it had Windows emulation, but it wasn't great. As I recall, IBM and Microsoft had a spat resulting in MS no longer assisting IBM in the Windows emulation, which helped put the nail in the coffin.

 

Oh, and I still have my record collection, about 500 of them. And my old Thorens turntable from about '71. Bought a B&O from ebay along with spare belts for both. I have no plan to re-buy all of that music either on CD or downloads.

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This one kind of baffles me:



Wasn't OS/2 created by IBM to compete with Bill Gates/MS?

It started out as a joint project to develop a mutli-threaded, multi-tasking OS.

 

It was generally thought to be a well architected OS with a lot going for its core -- but there was almost nothing to run on it. Just this one, lonely Oracle database I heard about once...

 

;)

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Heh, heh, yep, good one... Was one of our many learning experiences with Oracle and their BS claim that 'Oracle is Oracle' despite the OS/hardware platform. We even ran it on the mainframe for awhile until our unix environment was in place. At least that got me to go to some cool conferences in San Diego:)

 

I seem to recall that OS2 got somewhat widely implemented on ATMs at that time, but don't have direct knowledge of that. But little else.

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OS/2 had the insurmountable obstacle of IBM's soul-deep incomprehension of the larger marketplace. And then there was the PS/2 debacle. IBM thought they could stuff the genie back in the bottle by creating a a line of completely proprietary PCs, the upper tiers of which would run OS/2. The PCs themselves were overpriced junk, trapped in absurd cases that made them a huge pain to try to get in and out of. And OS/2 was nowhere near ready for the release of the hardware, so they ended up running PC-DOS, despite IBM's DOS should be dead marketing feints.

 

Of course, these are the same geniacs who, even after the Apple II had been on the market for a couple years, when presented the prototypes of the original PC, could not imagine why anyone would want to own a personal computer, except, perhaps, to keep recipes on in the kitchen. (True story.)

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How bout some real vintage stuff. I got my first job in electronics working for Monroe.

They still had thousands of these old mechanical beasts in operation when I started.

They were into earlay PC's as well. A typical calculator with Nixie Tube display cost $1000.

All it could do is add and subtract and it didnt even have a print ribbon.

 

Something more advanced sold for big bucks even by todays standards.

The company made many times that amount on service contracts to repair and maintain them.

http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/monroe_epic_3000.html

 

They also had hundreds of thousands of mechanical beasts still in service.

Some of the things done mechanically that are done by computer code now are truely amazing.

When people think computers, they think "new" but the mathamatics in back of a computer

is as old as history itself.

were truely amazing.

 

Mechanical and electro mechanical memory took many shapes in forms over the years.

Some are a real hoot by todays standards.

 

Electronocs, Tape memory, were a major revolution in downsizing things.

I think 1K of memory cost $1000 at the time I had gotten into electronics.

 

Heres a good one audio types would appreciate. This memory is basically a reverb spring.

It was an echo loop that saved the digital pulses for a second then reproduced the loop over and over

till that digital pulse was needed and recoverd and added to a computation.

One single pulse of data of ones and zeros was a huge time value for accountants.

The units werent cheap either. They originally sold for $5000 and up depending on the version.

 

http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/calculator_memory_technologies.html

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Yeah, I took the Fortran course in grad school, 1980. The big stacks of amber cards, and the output bin presided over by the resident gods-of-the-mainframe. Most everyone had an unintentional loop in their practice program, so the output bin would have about 20 lbs of wide dot-matrix paper you'd have to go pick up under the withering stares of the aforementioned gods.

 

A few short years later I was working at a bank when the first PCs were wheeled in. Our department had the informal PC guru - you know how that went back then.

 

The PC guru had a great story from the days when he oversaw the installation of the monstrously huge approx. 45K memory computer in the bank proof department. He gets this call in the middle of the night, "WE'RE WAY OUT OF BALANCE!!! I MEAN WAY WAY OUT!!! HELP!!!!" And so the guru wakes up enough to say, "exactly how much out of balance are you? Is it $16,777,216 by any chance?" A short stunned pause - "YES!!! How did you know?" That was the figure that revealed the memory limit - all the registers flipped over to zero at that grand total and started over on the one big account that totaled up all the deposits in the bank.

 

Back to the PCs, I remember getting the new OS on the big floppy - wow, DOS 1.1 !! What does this one do now? XCOPY - cool!

 

It was a great way to learn PCs, getting each successive DOS upgrade and poring over it, figuring out the new stuff - like PEEK and POKE, etc. We had a lot of fun figuring out how to lock co-workers out of their PCs by highjacking the keystrokes and stuff. What geeks...:facepalm:

 

nat whilk ii

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And then there was the heartbreak of broken rubber bands holding your program card stack together. It happened to me once just as I was walking up to the job submission counter. All these proto-geeks looking up from their penciled-up printouts... nervous, there-but-for-the-grace-of-the-gods-of-computing-go-I laughter...

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The PC guru had a great story from the days when he oversaw the installation of the monstrously huge approx. 45K memory computer in the bank proof department. He gets this call in the middle of the night, "WE'RE WAY OUT OF BALANCE!!! I MEAN WAY WAY OUT!!! HELP!!!!" And so the guru wakes up enough to say, "exactly how much out of balance are you? Is it $16,777,216 by any chance?" A short stunned pause - "YES!!! How did you know?" That was the figure that revealed the memory limit - all the registers flipped over to zero at that grand total and started over on the one big account that totaled up all the deposits in the bank.

 

Limits are interesting thing. I make my living from the computer industry these days, for embedded programming. I'm the problem solver guy, I don't write much code but I delve deep into what is causing "the system" to misbehave.

 

A couple of years ago I worked on the big honk'ing optical switches, the stuff that moves data in the long haul networks over fiber optics. A customer reported that an entire bank of switches went down in something like 49 days and had a bunch of error logs. The row of switches were all powered up at the same time, and it was a millisecond counter deep in a subsystem which had a time out, which didn't account for the fact in a 32 bit system and incrementing every millisecond, a counter would rollover every 49.71 days (in fact, when the customer complained that 6 systems when pretty much cablooie at the 49 day mark, I knew what the problem was, but not where, that took a little longer of manual code searching to find. It was one of those times where the code fix was only 12 lines, but the comments in the code explaining the why and hereto was closer to 100 lines.... ).

 

Hitting limits isn't something old that has gone away :)

 

My first experience with a small factor computer was with something called a "Sorcerer" that my father used at his university in the late 70s IIRC, then we got a commodore at home. I was the first kid on the block with a 1200 baud modem. Lawd, I'm such a geek.

 

My father in law, was a computer technician in the 60s and 70s, and the stories he tells... well mine pale by comparison but could only really be appreciated with high levels of geekitude.

 

I never had to use punch cards, so I may be lucky :) I've seen them flying by after someone accidentally dropped them on a windy day.

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I too learned programming on punched cards. Dropping them greatly expanded my vocabulary of expletives.

 

One of my first assignments as a programmer for a bank, was replacing a card based data entry system on a Nixdorf minicomputer. It basically duplicated the cardpunch process, same keyboard as a card punch, but it had a screen for the operator, field level editing, the ability to correct mistakes, etc. A real step up from cards. I'll never forget the day I introduced it to the data entry folks. They watched patiently while I ran them through it then their supervisor said " I don't like it ". I couldn't believe it, and explained how, instead of having to re-key a card if they made a mistake, they could just correct it, couldn't drop a 'deck'. Didn't matter; it was a CHANGE, and they didn't like CHANGE. I guess if you can tolerate what to me would be a mind numbingly repetitive job like data entry, you don't want anything interfering with it. They eventually adapted, since they had no choice, but it was an eye opener for me; not the last time in my career.

 

I 'retired' about a year ago and don't miss it a bit, especially when sitting next to my wife while she argues with Oracle tech support. Still, I get to swear at my PCs regularly. That part hasn't changed since I got my first PC XT.

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And then there was the heartbreak of broken rubber bands holding your program card stack together. It happened to me once just as I was walking up to the job submission counter. All these proto-geeks looking up from their penciled-up printouts... nervous, there-but-for-the-grace-of-the-gods-of-computing-go-I laughter...

 

 

LOL, seriously. Lordy, what a Woody Allen moment - sproingggggg.....arghhhhh!!.

 

OTOH, there was something awe-inspriring about watching those cards feed into the system...that damn thinking machine was a perfect servant and a merciless master all at the same time, depending on whether you made the slightest mistake or not....HAL or whatever your name was....those days are so hard to evoke now.

 

nat whilk ii

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.


I'll never forget the day I introduced it to the data entry folks. They watched patiently while I ran them through it then their supervisor said " I don't like it ". I couldn't believe it, and explained how, instead of having to re-key a card if they made a mistake, they could just correct it, couldn't drop a 'deck'. Didn't matter; it was a CHANGE, and they didn't like CHANGE. I guess if you can tolerate what to me would be a mind numbingly repetitive job like data entry, you don't want anything interfering with it.

 

 

My wife works for the local school district in the department that tests kids hearing and vision. Y'all remember that - the big headphones, the eye charts, etc. It's not a big deal for the "haves" families, but for the "have nots" this is a very valuable service, let me tell you..

 

Anyway. This is a contemporary story BTW. What they do is write down the results for each kid, one by one. They check these boxes on a form, etc. And then they input the data, per kid, into their laptops. And then they print out the laptop report and input the data again, kid by kid, into the district SASSI mainframe database. Oh, and it's all point and click drop-down boxes, too, on the mainframe. No typing actual one or two digits numbers, it's "move the mouse, find the field, drop it down, scroll to the number, hit the button, then scroll back down to the next one." Instead of "whack/whack/return..next".

 

It takes bloody forever.

 

Ok, everyone all at once yell, "REDUNDANT!!" I hope the school district hears you. The more redundant, the more human errors, obviously.

 

Now I've always kept the fam in fast, new computers starting at about age 8. So we all know the basics. My wife suggest, "hey, you know, ummm... you could maybe upload the laptop data from Excel into the mainframe and skip the step of hand-entering the data into the mainframe, ya know, like??"

 

NO - THE LAPTOPS COULD SEND BAD STUFF INTO THE MAINFRAME - so sayeth the gods of the district mainframes.

 

Ok, says the wife, then...ummm....how about you reformat the input screens on the mainframe so we can enter the actual numbers directly, and tab to the next field. Here, let me show you...I can probably enter everything in a couple of hours that takes our whole department the afternoon, using those drop-down boxes...ya know??"

 

NO - IF YOU CAN ENTER ANY NUMBER YOU WANT YOU WILL INTRODUCE UNTOLD ERRORS INTO THE DATA ENTRY say the mainframe gods.

 

So....our tax dollars at work...dropping down the little boxes, scrolling to the right number, hitting return, navigating with the mouse back to the next field.....

 

nat whilk ii

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When I started electronics school in the late '80s my sister un-mothballed the 'ole IBM PC so I could use it. Computers were a new thing for me then. I remember I got a copy of Leisure Suit Larry but it wouldn't run on the old monocrome beast so I acquired a color monitor and a different video board. The problem was that the printer port was on the original video board so whenever I needed to use that I'd have to swap 'em.

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LOL, seriously. Lordy, what a Woody Allen moment - sproingggggg.....arghhhhh!!.


OTOH, there was something awe-inspriring about watching those cards feed into the system...that damn thinking machine was a perfect servant and a merciless master all at the same time, depending on whether you made the slightest mistake or not....HAL or whatever your name was....those days are so hard to evoke now.


nat whilk ii

The machines were all elsewhere, down in engineering. But engineering didn't have any computer classes as the time. In fact, the first time I took Fortran, I think it may have been the only programming class. Looking back, it's probably amazing that the administration was willing to share the mainframe that ran the grades keeping... It took them forever to get computerized registration in place. Pre-computerization it took about a week. After, it took about 7 days.

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My wife works for the local school district in the department that tests kids hearing and vision. Y'all remember that - the big headphones, the eye charts, etc. It's not a big deal for the "haves" families, but for the "have nots" this is a very valuable service, let me tell you..


Anyway. This is a contemporary story BTW. What they do is write down the results for each kid, one by one. They check these boxes on a form, etc. And then they input the data, per kid, into their laptops. And then they print out the laptop report and input the data again, kid by kid, into the district SASSI mainframe database. Oh, and it's all point and click drop-down boxes, too, on the mainframe. No typing actual one or two digits numbers, it's "move the mouse, find the field, drop it down, scroll to the number, hit the button, then scroll back down to the next one." Instead of "whack/whack/return..next".


It takes bloody
forever
.


Ok, everyone all at once yell, "REDUNDANT!!" I hope the school district hears you. The more redundant, the more human errors, obviously.


Now I've always kept the fam in fast, new computers starting at about age 8. So we all know the basics. My wife suggest, "hey, you know, ummm... you could maybe upload the laptop data from Excel into the mainframe and skip the step of hand-entering the data into the mainframe, ya know, like??"


NO - THE LAPTOPS COULD SEND BAD STUFF INTO THE MAINFRAME - so sayeth the gods of the district mainframes.


Ok, says the wife, then...ummm....how about you reformat the input screens on the mainframe so we can enter the actual numbers directly, and tab to the next field. Here, let me show you...I can probably enter everything in a couple of hours that takes our whole department the afternoon, using those drop-down boxes...ya know??"


NO - IF YOU CAN ENTER ANY NUMBER YOU WANT YOU WILL INTRODUCE UNTOLD ERRORS INTO THE DATA ENTRY say the mainframe gods.


So....our tax dollars at work...dropping down the little boxes, scrolling to the right number, hitting return, navigating with the mouse back to the next field.....


nat whilk ii

That's pretty incredible -- particularly in 2011.

 

But, of course, anyone who's been around for a couple decades has heard a few of these stories.

 

One of my old neighbors actually was an agent of change at her (private sector) business. She hired in as a temp and had been prepping these monthly reports that would go out to department heads. For the IT guys, the uncollated data sets were always an afterthought so she'd have to wait for all their input, which was all print outs, do some summing calculations, then she'd have to copy the numbers into WordPerfect, ask the graphics department to make the charts, and so on. This was '88 or so.

 

One month the departments were particularly slow getting her data to her. She was running out of time, so she went to the IT guys -- not the department heads -- and said, can you give me this stuff on a floppy? They did. They were relieved to not have to schedule the print jobs.

 

She set up a spreadsheet in Lotus, set up the required graphs -- including some that hadn't been done before -- and she was done early. Even though she hadn't even officially got her data yet through the set up channels -- or bothered the art department.

 

She was kind of afraid she'd get fired or reprimanded. (I believe her words were, If they're dumb enough to fire me, I don't think I want to work there. I can't keep on taking a month to do what can be done in an afternoon. For my own sanity.) But they actually recognized her initiative and 'ingenuity,' made her full time and put her under one of the cool guys in IT, who was kind of her mentor from then on until he retired.

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