Technology..

Page may contain affiliate links. Please see terms for details.
Smokin Joe

Smokin Joe

Squire
Location
Bare headed cyclist, Smoker
oldwheels said:
When I was a student the very latest thing had bits of paper with holes punched in them and we had to learn about binary something or other.
Click to expand...
In the late sixties when I was an apprentice engineer the firm got a machine controlled by a punched paper tape. It carried out six operations, drilling, reaming, tapping and milling among them, and all the operator had to do was load the work and press start. For a long time only the apprentices were allowed to use it as they could not figure how to work it into the bonus scheme.
 
Ming the Merciless

Ming the Merciless

There is no mercy
Location
Inside my skull
Since we are reminiscing.

I started my IT career as a trainee analyst programmer on system 36 then later mainframes. Magnetic tapes were in use. A few years later I went on call for all our mainframe applications. Part of the training was to spend a week on shift with our IT operations team. When they saw my user ID a groan went up. Apparently every request for an archived tape being mounted required their intervention. I'd recalled a lot of tapes recently. Not long after tape loading and archival was fully automated.
 
Ming the Merciless

Ming the Merciless

There is no mercy
Location
Inside my skull
DCBassman said:
Yes! But what IS a sticklebyte? 10 to the...
Click to expand...

Well none of them are ten to the power as they are all multiples of the kilobyte, which is 2 to the power..
 
  • Like
Reactions: C R
E

Edwardoka

Guest
Drago said:
The police national compute is due for replacement in 2023, by which time it will be 50 years old. its awkward to use and doing searches is a bit like entering commands in DOS, eg, surname/firstname/middlename/dob/gender/ethnicity etc, but it is pretty reliable and does work well once you've got your head around it.

What the betting the replacement will be late, massively over budget, and not fit for purpose?
Click to expand...
The last time I was there, ScottishPower's main customer database was on a mainframe with access via terminal. I can still do meter exchanges and tariff updates from muscle memory 12 years later. vim is a doddle compared to that system.

Of course all the GUI applications that were built by contractors that hung off the side of the system were unfailingly rubbish.
 
Ming the Merciless

Ming the Merciless

There is no mercy
Location
Inside my skull
Edwardoka said:
The last time I was there, ScottishPower's main customer database was on a mainframe with access via terminal. I can still do meter exchanges and tariff updates from muscle memory 12 years later. vim is a doddle compared to that system.

Of course all the GUI applications that were built by contractors that hung off the side of the system were unfailingly rubbish.
Click to expand...

Well it’d be on the mainframe since terminals are just dumb. Mainframes have supported Internet network protocols for some time. So they could just shift it to a browser interface if they wanted to. Mainframes can also easily run windows and Linux stuff if that’s your thing.
 
E

Edwardoka

Guest
YukonBoy said:
Well it’d be on the mainframe since terminals are just dumb. Mainframes have supported Internet network protocols for some time. So they could just shift it to a browser interface if they wanted to. Mainframes can also easily run windows and Linux stuff if that’s your thing.
Click to expand...
As far as I could tell those apps that hung off the side worked by sending fake keystrokes to the mainframe and screen scraping. The system was extremely old - I wonder if they still use it as the backbone for everything, as I believe it predated deregulation which would make it 1989 at the latest, a lot of the features required to support interoperability with other suppliers were literally non-existent.

We needed to use other systems to interop with other suppliers, and there were as many of these as there were use cases.

I don't want to go too much detail other than to say that one of these systems was a directory full of csv files that got FTP'd to a remote server.
A lot of excel was involved, the whole thing was slipshod, and I'm amazed it worked at all.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom