PC-MOS?

At 11:02 PM 4/11/2007 -0700, Chuck Guzis wrote: Based on everyone else's descriptions, I'm almost certain this is something I ran into. When I got involved with my college's newspaper in 1992, working in the photography department, I'd sometimes hear the people in the newsroom refer to "the mainframe," which is where they typed stories. They were using networked Macintoshes for page layout. (In photo, we were rolling film from bulk canisters, developing it, and making prints on a photo enlarger. By the time I'd gotten involved, they had just stopped using the "stat machine" (which would make line-screened images of the photo prints, suitable for pasting onto the final newspaper pages that were subsequently photographed by our publisher) and were now scanning the printed photos into a computer using a flatbed scanner connected to a Macintosh. Final newspaper pages were still partially pasted together, and picked up by our publisher for photographing.) One day, I caught wind of a crisis in the newsroom: "The mainframe is down!" Having had worked with mainframes (and minis and PC's...) since I was 6 or 7, I decided to investigate to see if I could help out. What I discovered were these terminals running an MS-DOS-based word processor (I don't remember which one - was probably WordPerfect, and certainly not Wordstar), all hooked up to a single IBM PC that had a set of about 5 interface cards driving those terminals. Mainframe indeed! I don't remember what the problem was, but it was something that my knowledge of MS-DOS made easy to solve. While I was repairing it, I took the opportunity to inform them that they most certainly were not using a mainframe. I suspect that, prior to acquiring this machine, they were using terminals connected to one of the campus systems (probably the VAX), and so the nomenclature and concept had carried over from then. By the next year, they had retired the multi-user PC, and were just using networked Mac SE's for word processing. (By '96 they were scanning negatives into the computer instead of prints, and by '97 they were sending an electronic document to the publisher instead of printed pages. Ah, where's the fun gone...) - Ken