On 19/10/2013 01:31, Sander Reiche wrote: Yes but manual loading tape drives on a 3033? The space saving system is full of manual load tapes? I would have thought by that time all the drives had autoload collars... .. and did any other site have a mini reel with the tape wound on the wrong way round. Great training aid for new operators... Dave G4UGM

On 19/10/2013 20:33, SPC wrote: I think one thing I really remember was powering up a 4381 after a Christmas shutdown. I remember it had two strings of 3380 some 3420 tape units, screen controller and some comms kit. If folks think booting up Windows is slow they should try powering up the 4381. You did just hit one which loaded the CPU micro code. You then choose the power on menu and a whole room would come to life. The controllers all loaded their micro-code then the disks spun up one cabinet at a time. Everything in sequence so that nothing tripped the main breakers. A real wonder to be hold,

Multiple BOT stickers would effectively partition the tape. Care to talk about how/where/why you used this? De

On 19/10/2013 22:07, Chuck Guzis wrote: From what I remember the drives on our Honeywell (re-badged Magnetic Peripherals inc? Correct me if I am wrong) could be manually loaded without too much trouble, but being a Systems Programmer (so some one who didn't do very much actually programming or operating , just applied patches and fixes etc) I usually got a real operator to mount the tapes.... I seem to remember the ones on our older H3200 stalling the auxilary generator during rewind at End of Job. After that the ops used to flip the offline switch and manually rewind. These were weird 1200BPI NRZI drives but I have no idea who made those.... Dave

On 10/18/13 9:01 PM, TeoZ wrote: Brings back memories for sure. On the first mainframe system I worked with in the mid 80's we had to prevent anyone from entering lower case letters into the IMS data bases because the chain printer only printed upper case letters. If it encountered a lower case letter it left a blank. God forbid someone forgot to do that when we created a new screen for data entry. We had to change the screen edits to allow lower case when we finally got a chain that could print both upper and lower case. I remember how excited everyone was that we could now print in mixed case. The first laser I worked with was a Xerox that was huge, like the size of two desks stacked one on top of another. We were then able to print on regular 8.5x11 paper, but we got complaints from accounting about it not being green bar. I had to program the Xerox (it had its own language) to print gray shaded bars like the green bar pin fed paper from the chain printer. The computer operators were excited that we could insert a colored sheet of paper for each new report and even multiple copies to make it easier for them to route reports to the correct departments. No more running pin fed paper through bursting machines and breaking apart reports. Mark -- From the eComStation Desktop of: Mark Dodel Warpstock 2013 - http://www.warpstock.org Warpstock Europe 2013 -http://www.warpstock.eu For a choice in the future of personal computing, Join VOICE - http://www.os2voice.org "The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That in it's essence, is Fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any controlling private power." Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Message proposing the Monopoly Investigation, 1938

Chuck Guzis wrote: I did not directly participate in this, but some persons at my high school figured out how to control the ribbon advance on the chain printer attached to the hp-3000 at our school. In addition, they discovered that the hammers extended past (or maybe right up to) the edges of the ribbon. They then created a job that printed repeated full lines of underscores without advancing the ribbon, resulting in neatly cutting the ribbon. They thought it was very funny forcing the operator to have to mount a new ribbon (a messy job). Then they were chewed out because the ribbons cost a lot, maybe 30 or 40 1977 dollars? Bill S.

The folks restoring the 1440 and 1403 at CT&I in Binghamton consider "Anchors Aweigh" to be a major milestone in the project. :-)