24 Jun
2020
24 Jun
'20
4:26 p.m.
On 6/24/2020 2:12 PM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
On 6/24/20 1:23 PM, Jon Elson via cctalk wrote:
One of my buddies had a football game, sort of like the logic of basic
games that came along, but was written in Cobol.? was about 3 or 4
inches of cards and a nice game.
The thing was written to use WTO and WTOR which isn't that big a deal in
a lot of shops.
However when you've got a lot of jobs running and need the console,
having to play a game of football to get back access to the console
wasn't amusing.? We (students, users) all looked at each other, and
figured they'd have a way around that, wouldn't they, and he ran it.
Also regardless the retries and the tape channel were intertwined and
when the tape was retrying the console I/O was locked up. Channel attach
or not.
The other useless bit (going way off the subject of tape) the system
used HASP for a lot of the job scheduling on the site with a lot of mods
to HASP and the system initiator code.
Relative to the cobol football game, i discovered from reading the
initiator code that one could issue console commands from any reader
attached to an initiator by putting a / in front of the command and
having it be valid.? I was nice and told the operators and the system
programmer guys it was active.? I got to do a couple of simple display
commands and kept it to myself while they fixed the initiators to not
accept commands.
The bad news was that was a couple weeks before my other friend decided
to run football.
thanks
Jim
The 1052 Selectric console on the 360's were
not on a channel, but
driven via direct I/O directly from the CPU microcode.? (Yes, the
console has a pseudo channel address that made you THINK it was on a
channel, but it actually wasn't.)
One prank to pull on an operator was to
write a CCW chain to ring the
1052 bell and then to a TIC back to the bell ring CCW.
At least on DOS/360, pretty much impossible to kill without doing an
IPL, as the keyboard would be locked.
Fun from my younger days.
--Chuck