[cctalk] Re: Operating system, on punch cards?

Hi All: My comments, worth two cents or less. The first computer I ever used was an IBM 1130 my city’s school district office at when I was a 14-year-old high school student. This was in 1974. My exploration of the “IBM Disk Monitor System" on the machine led to me clobbering the FORTRAN compiler on the removable hard disk by mistake one evening. The disk had a form factor similar to the DEC RK05. Staff discovered the problem the next morning and had to reload the compiler from punched cards. They told me that they restored the entire system disk (OS and FORTRAN) rather than just the compiler. I saw the ~5 drawers of punched cards that they used for this. I was mortified at my mistake and expected that I was in BIG trouble. Apparently the restore took most of the day. In this case it looks like the OS was held as backup on cards. It was a small installation and there were no peripherals other than a card reader and the integrated system console.