teaching young IT certed person about old minis/mainframes

[Nico de Jong]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tom Sparks" <tom_a_sparks at yahoo.com.au>
>A question for the ones that work in the industry and are working with
> old mini and/or mainframes:
>
> How do you teach a young IT certed person about the old minis/mainframe
> that your department maintains?

I would say that the first thing to explain is the difference between today 
and say 20-30-40 years ago. There was a time when most things were done 
batchwise, as the systems were rather small (compared to today) and on-line 
updates impossible. Forexample, one of the first machines i worked on, an 
IBM 360/40 has a whopping 128k memory, 4x IBM 2311 drives (7.25 MB each), 
and 8 tapedrives.
As recent as two weeks ago, I was in the netherlands to collect 2 harddrives 
for Philips minis from the 70's 80's; each had a capacity of 2 x 2.5 MB
Long ago, programming was a form of art; you had to do with what was 
available; today it is more like throwing tools together, and hope that they 
stick :-)
/Nico