6 Jul
2005
6 Jul
'05
11:26 a.m.
Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
In the old days, IBM was stupid and didn't want anyone to learn about
their computers. They kept them locked up behind glass walls where one
could only drool over them, and only let priveleged people touch them. So
My experience is the S/360 & 370's machines ran 24x7 and there was
little time left over for hacking. But if you got to be friends with
the operators and read all the manuals and what source code you could
find, you could do some pretty fun hacks.
I used to submit jobs into the dos/vs job queue and view source code on
cics terminals long before I saw commercial support for the such things.
I did it by hacking during nights and weekends when the operator would
let me try a few experimental things (and didn't mind if it brought the
whole thing down).
The DEC machines (in my experience) were often not in a 24x7 enviroment
and often in educational settings where bringing down the system was not
such a huge deal.
Obviously there are exceptions to both sides of this. it's just my
experience...
(I remember seeing a lonely pdp-8 with a DF-32 sitting in the corner of
a CAD lab and someone said - "yea, have at it - see if you can get it to
boot". no one ever said that about a S/360 :-)
-brad