Computer Operator September 23, 2004
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Uncategorized , trackbackI used to work with mainframe computers, just like the one in the photo except ICL instead of IBM. See those huge reel-to-reel magnetic tape decks, I think we had 12 of them and a bank of 8 exchangeable multi-platter disk drives, each one the size of a washing machine and able to provide a massive 30K of online storage capacity after about 3 minutes getting up to speed.
Jobs were initialised by feeding a short piece of paper tape with punched holes in it into a reader. The main console would then report the status of the job queue by printing it out on a teletype, and you could watch the flashing lights as well. With practise you could get to know what was going in the main processing unit ( next door ) by listening to the console speaker, which buzzed and crackled as the sophisticated GEORGE3 operating system swapped processes in out of the incredibly expensive 128k solid state memory ( sort of like a fridge/freezer, but blue).
There were two such machines in the whole county, one at the County Council and one at the big china clay mining company. That 128k, by way, is 128kwords not bytes. A word, in ICL’s terminology, was deemed to be four characters, and a character was made up of only six bits - not eight. Binary is very simple, and 6 binary digits together can hold a largest number of 111111 - which is 1+2+4+8+16+32 = 63.
Now if you add together the minimum number of punctuation and control characters, and the numerical characters 0-9, there weren’t enough codes left to have the entire alphabet duplicated in both upper and lower case - so THAT MEANT THAT EVERYBODY HAD TO GO AROUND SHOUTING ALL THE TIME. WELL, THE NOISE OF THE PRINTERS WAS DEAFENING ANYWAY, BUT YOU KNOW SOMETHING? THEY WORKED TIRELESSLY DAY AND NIGHT PRINTING OUT BOXES AND BOXES OF MULTI-PART CARBON COPY CONTINUOUS PRE-PRINTED STATIONERY REPORTS WHICH WERE THEN CARRIED INTO THE VARIOUS OFFICES AND DUMPED IN A BIG PILE IN A CORNER WHERE NOBODY WOULD EVER READ THEM. TELL THAT TO THE POOPED OUT COLOUR INK-JETS AND CRASHED LASERS OF TODAY AND THEY WOULDN’T BELIEVE YOU!
4 Comments
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
Computers Were So Much Better In The Old Days
Well, not quite, but, as my dad points out, at least they were fairly reliable and the printers worked. In the bookshop where I work, we only recently upgraded our computer system from DOS to Windows. The new system has…
This reminded me of when I first left school and started work, the height of technology was a telex machine…. I wonder if they exist anymore?
Let me be utterly impolite… Does that mean you’re an old man?
Great account here Andy, I sometimes wish I was working with computers in those early days. Though the college I was taught binary among other things like logic gates and octal was not far behind this…lol Great photo and blog by the way