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Operatings Systems: reminiscences

Blue Bubble

Sharper than a thorn
Blue Bubble
Joined
May 9, 2005
Messages
6,455
Location
The Green, Duxford, Cambridgeshire, UK
Recent posts in the "Dear Users... (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people)" thread have prompted a number of us to post about things that seem to have become ingrained in our minds from many decades ago.


Examples include weird stuff about IBM JCL, its syntax, and strange incantations that would simply baffle younger generations.


Since I have only just retired (http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=345114), I think such reminiscences will pop up in my mind more and more.


So, who can come up with (probably-)useless stuff from the Olden Days?
I'll start with saying I can still remember that IBM 3330 disk drives ("DASD") had a track-size of 13,030 bytes (it was not fixed-length 512 byte blocks as nowadays), which you needed to know in order to get the maximum usage for whichever datasets (files) you were creating (e.g. for card-image files, 12,960 was the optimal blocksize). The IBM 3330 had a capacity of 100 Mbytes. Similarly, the larger IBM 3350 had a track-size of 19,069 and a capacity of 317 Mbytes.


I remember my first programming in 1969/1970 - my school (Bo'ness Academy in Scotland) had a very good maths teacher who could foresee the future of computing and its importance. So we learned Fortran-IV and ALGOL 60WP in parallel. One of my first programs made use of the random number generator function in Fortran to simulate a roulette wheel, and fellow classmates would place small bets on various numbers/colours/odd-even things. We'd fill out programming forms, and these would be sent off to the University of Edinburgh, where they'd be transferred onto 80-column punched cards. The program would then run on an IBM System/360 Model 50WP, and any syntax errors were costly (turnaround time was ca 1 week !)


Alas, that's when I discovered that the "random" number generator would generate the same numbers if given the same seed value ... the first run of the program was to make sure it worked, the second run of the same program was the real-deal with the small bets placed. I had to return everyone's money :o
 
At the other end, my bud had a Corvus 10Mb HDD, external, that he used with his Macintosh. It plugged into the external floppy and mouse port simultaneously, and sounded like a jet engine when it started up.

Not knowing what to do with all that storage space, he made it into 6 partitions, each the size of the Mac's floppy.
 
Childlike Empress said:
You've met Wau Holland? Go tell, he was someone who clearly died too soon.
Click to expand...


He visited my house in Heidelberg when we were being interviewed by a journalist/book author. It was around the time when The Cuckoo's EggWP by Clifford StollWP was published. I'll say no more on the subject (it's not difficult to discover my real name).


ETA: I feature in the book.
 
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Blue Bubble said:
He visited my house in Heidelberg when we were being interviewed by a journalist/book author. It was around the time when The Cuckoo's EggWP by Clifford StollWP was published. I'll say no more on the subject (it's not difficult to discover my real name).
Click to expand...


I've read that book but can't find it in my most precious data, the eBook library, right now. Didn't mean to stalk you anyway, just interested in some first-hand experiences with a great beard of the early digital mindset.
 
My first OS was Unix Version 7 on a PDP-11/34. 64K RAM. Four 8" 1MB platters for storage. I learned to code C with the line editor and CC. What other coding tools would one need?
 
For me it was just how... non-integrated things like DOS and even early versions of Windows were. For the longest time an OS wasn't something you like like spent any real time on your computer working in. It booted the computer up and did some maintenance and admin and setup tasks but that was it. That's why the feel so un-user friendly to so many modern users, but they weren't really meant to be. You didn't just boot your computer up and leave DOS or Pre-95 Windows up while you did stuff.

I even remember "Boot Loaders" briefly when PC gaming where really high end games bypassed the OS entirely and booted directly so they didn't have to share overhead or PC resources with the OS.
 
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For about a year, I, a mechanical engineer, somehow became responsible for the care and feeding of a VAX-750. Even got it upgraded to a whopping 8MB of memory and 500MB of disk space! Wrote batch files for it, although IIRC they were called something else.
Came in useful for learning MS-DOS!
 
I remember toggling in (literally) the boot loader on a PDP-8 at Poly, so the OS could be read in from paper tape.

And a couple of years later, we got a brand new ICL mainframe, with, IIRC, 256K of main memory! It was running VME-K, and emulating an IBM mainframe, my first experience of virtual computing. ICL stopped supporting VME-K shortly afterwards, and they had to supply extra hardware to enable the computer to have the same capacity running VME-B. I had started working at ICL by then; I used VME systems there, but worked first on a new system that was cancelled, then on a UNIX based modular system. I believe I once saw George Felton, after whom the GEORGE operating systems were named (I used one running GEORGE 3), in the canteen.
 
I really feel I should be participating in this thread. Thanks Blue Bubble.

But I don't know where to start. The first computer keyboard I entered data on was that of a Burroughs E-101 in 1960 or so when I was calculating wing loads for the Canadair CL-44 airplane as an engineering assistant one summer while I was at university. No OS, just a big plug board.

It's on this site: https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/172122016986966061/

The interesting sad thing is how many of the other computers I recognize at that url.

Some days I do feel old. :sigh:
 
Several years ago I acquired a couple boxes of these. I use them as bookmarks for larger books. I've been leaving a few in the Little Free Libraries around the neighborhood.

I should probably look at selling some batches on eBay as they look to fetch a nice price.
 

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I discovered, entirely by accident, that the Windows NT 4.0 command prompt supports redirecting standard error with the "2>&1" or "2><file>" syntax. This is the convention for UNIX / Linux Bourne Shell and derivitaves (i. e. Korn Shell and BASH). I discovered it when I used the syntax by mistake, as I was doing quite a bit of work in UNIX systems at the time. I immediately thought to myself, "That doesn't work in Windows, dummy.". but to my surprise, it did work exactly as it would have in a UNIX shell. This was not documented at all that I ever found in the Windows help files for NT 4.0, or any other official Microsoft documents for that OS that I ever found. The feature also existed in XP (and all later versions of Windows) and was documented in the help files for XP (probably later versions too, though I haven't looked for it recently.
 
Another one: Back around the turn of the century, my workplace transitioned from using Novell Netware file servers to Windows servers. At the time, my workstation ran NT 4.0. After all the servers I used had been moved to Windows, I uninstalled the Netware driver from my workstation, which resulted in a huge boost in performance. It was like I had gotten a brand new PC with a much faster processor.
 
CORed said:
I discovered, entirely by accident, that the Windows NT 4.0 command prompt supports redirecting standard error with the "2>&1" or "2><file>" syntax. This is the convention for UNIX / Linux Bourne Shell and derivitaves (i. e. Korn Shell and BASH). I discovered it when I used the syntax by mistake, as I was doing quite a bit of work in UNIX systems at the time. I immediately thought to myself, "That doesn't work in Windows, dummy.". but to my surprise, it did work exactly as it would have in a UNIX shell. This was not documented at all that I ever found in the Windows help files for NT 4.0, or any other official Microsoft documents for that OS that I ever found. The feature also existed in XP (and all later versions of Windows) and was documented in the help files for XP (probably later versions too, though I haven't looked for it recently.
Click to expand...

Some years back there was a stink among geeks that MS had ripped off the BSD TP/IP stack for NT. Someone found some clear identification of BSD in a debug dump IIRC. This was never really contested, and of course this explains why the net on NT worked reasonably well.

It wouldn't surprise me if much of the working code in MS products has been stolen from Unix.
 
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