I was working on a 370-135 in 1974, for a US bank (Morgan Guaranty) in the City
of London. I don’t think that we bought any extra kit during my time there,
but the computer and its peripherals took up a lot of air-conditioned space on
one floor of the bank. There were about 8 punch-card keyboard operators in the
office next to the computer, so the personnel costs must have been huge, what
with about 5 programmers and us operators.
Then there were the systems analysts on call to fix the thing when it dumped,
normally at about 10 in the evening, and the backups in another bank about half
a mile away . . .
I learned quite a lot about early computers from that machine. Oh, and the big
line printer had a sweet spot near the control panel where you could make bongo
sounds – for hours and hours :-)
Chris
> On 3 Nov 2017, at 17:55, Jan Steinman <Jan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> Moose wrote:
>> I also got an early IBM PCXT, with huge HD that wouldn't hold a single raw
>> file today.
>
>
> I built my first computer, a Heathkit. And then I spent $1,800 on an EIGHT
> INCH, FOUR MEGABYTE hard drive for it!
>
> I also built a memory card for it from scratch, using wire-wrap sockets for
> the RAM chips… it held SIXTEEN KILOBYTES of RAM! Boy, I felt memory-rich at
> the time!
>
> Typing this ASCII text message probably used more than 16kB on my
> ten-year-old computer...
>
> :::: Jan Steinman, EcoReality Co-op ::::
>
> --
> _________________________________________________________________
> Options: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/listinfo/olympus
> Archives: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/private/olympus/
> Themed Olympus Photo Exhibition: http://www.tope.nl/
>
--
_________________________________________________________________
Options: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/listinfo/olympus
Archives: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/private/olympus/
Themed Olympus Photo Exhibition: http://www.tope.nl/
|