Harris H800 Computer

[Zane Healy]

While I’d used several computers before the Harris H550 (I think that’s the right model, we called it “SNAP II” in the Navy), the Harris was the first that I worked on professionally.  Even though I was an Electrician at the time, I ended up as one of the people working on the Harris, and somewhere I should still have a printout of the “man pages” on its JCL.  It was running Vulcan OS, and I was able to get access to BASIC on it, and IIRC, that’s how I got access to the JCL interface.  I was also the only person onboard ship, and about the only person in the Navy apparently to use the 8” floppies, I used them to store Engineering documents written with the MUSE word processor (which at the time I thought was quite nice).  The system had quite a nice implementation of ZORK, and what I remember being a very cool Star Trek game, that wasn’t like the traditional Star Trek (which IIRC, it also had).

On the H550, the operators console was basically a normal terminal, with a printer.  We had a 9-track tape drive, paper-tape reader/punch, 2 or 3 pairs of 8” floppies around the ship, four 8” HD’s, which IIRC were 80MB each (but realistically likely smaller, we were really crunched for disk space).  There was also a punch card reader in the one office, but it could only read a single card at a time.  One interesting thing was, to copy one small file required typing a command string the length of a line on the terminal, it was a nightmare to use the floppies as a result.

All in all, I have good memories of working on the system, probably better than working on a Honeywell DPS-8 (or DPS-6) Mainframe running either GCOS-8 or GCOS-6.

BTW, VMS is pretty much my favorite OS, though sadly I’m not actively using it any more. :-(

Zane




> On Apr 20, 2016, at 8:33 PM, Mark J. Blair <nf6x at nf6x.net> wrote:
> 
> Back when I spent a couple of years at UNLV in the late 80s, I had a class in which I was forced to use an account on a Harris H800 computer, if my memory serves me correctly. Being a BSD snob, I felt that was a terrible imposition, much like being forced to calculate compound interest on a stone-age abacus made from partially petrified dinosaur turds. *Without gloves.*
> 
> Now, of course, I'm a lot more easy-going, and downright curious about things that might not have been my first choice for a computing environment. Even VMS!
> 
> So, does anybody here know anything about that family of computers? I seem to recall getting a tour of the computer room once, and the two front panels of the machine were swung open to reveal two thick, mattress-like beds of twisted pair wires. That seemed nauseatingly primitive to me at the time, but now the memory seems fascinating.
> 
> I also seem to remember an operator's console with two round CRTs on it, but I might have fabricated that memory from whole cloth.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
> http://www.nf6x.net/
>