1 Nov
2006
1 Nov
'06
10:37 a.m.
"Chuck Guzis" wrote:
On 1 Nov 2006 at 9:54, C Sullivan wrote:
Am I recalling correctly? I seem to remember watching the operators of
the (hmm. 370/158?) do that all the time. The would run a big
merge/sort and plop a lot of tapes in drives - I think we had at least
5, maybe more like 7-8 tape drives. Nice shiny vacuum column machines.
A joy to use and watch (course I never maintained them :-)
Originally we had something like a lowly 360/30 (this was in Wilmington
Del) but then a 370/158 was moved down from NYC. All of the databases
were on tape - disk was only used for temporary storage for a long time.
Later we got CICS and more on-line disk storage, and (yowza!) things like
source code control.
That place ran 24x7...
I'm having PL/1 flashbacks. ugg.
-brad
As to WHY you'd want to do a sort onto tape,
my To: field says this
is the classic computer mailing list. It sounds like a fun project
for somebody who as an old PDP (and the space for six tape drives) or
similar lying around. Heck, it might even make a fun programming
project to "emulate" it using a bitty box and some virtual "tape
drives". Lastly, it would make a great academic project for teaching.
I suppose that if it was "performance art" that someone wanted to
create, the effect would be more spectacular if paper tape
punch/readers were used. No reason why it shouldn't work...AFAIK,
all of the access in the algorithms is write/read/rewind; no fancy
random skipping.