19 Dec
2007
19 Dec
'07
1:16 p.m.
On Wednesday 19 December 2007 10:45, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 19 Dec 2007 at 8:41, cctalk-request at
classiccmp.org wrote:
Heh.
From: "Roy J. Tellason" <rtellason
at verizon.net>
Unfortunate as in it wasn't directly accessible then? I thought that the
point of such a setup was to keep a file accessible in digital form. Or
is that some sort of offline storage, like punched cards?
It depended on your idea of "accessible". It was "accessible" on
the
scale of, oh, say, a book requested through inter-library loan is
"accessible". Make a request, find a good Russian novel to read and
hope your file hasn't been lost. There was a very-much-frowned-upon program that was
popular among
users to open and close every single file cataloged under your
account just to avoid the dreaded Photostore.
So I guess that being done was based on the file not having been accessed
recently, then...
The 1360 was very typical of the wonderful Rube
Goldberg-style of
mechanical engineering that IBM was capable of.
After plowing my way through somewhat over 1500 pages of material on different
systems recently, I found some stuff of interest. It was a bit of a
surprise to me to find what Burroughs did back when interesting, although
they tried to do _so_ much in hardware to support the things they were trying
to do in software that changing anything must've been a nightmare to
contemplate.
I have a bit of a better picture now of DEC's line of machines, though they
cover a time period when the hardware was changing so drastically... I'm
still wondering where they went from there (where that stuff left off),
guess I need to dig out some more material to read that's just a bit more
recent.
And in reading about the various IBM boxes, only one word comes to
mind: "Baroque"!
Second perhaps only to the 3850 MSS or the 2321 DCD.
Certainly in a
different league from the competition (e.g., NCR CRAM), although the
ill-fated CDC SCROLL comes close...
I don't think I've run across anything on those just yet...
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin