ICL1501 Cobol manual available

[Dave Wade]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> On Behalf Of nico de jong via
> cctalk
> Sent: 17 April 2020 08:40
> To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
> Subject: Re: ICL1501 Cobol manual available
> 
> On 2020-04-17 09:12, ben via cctalk wrote:
> > On 4/17/2020 12:19 AM, Tomasz Rola via cctalk wrote:
> >> On Thu, Apr 16, 2020 at 10:00:17PM +0000, Tapley, Mark B. via cctalk
> >> wrote:
> >> [...]
> >>> Tomasz, forgive me but I have to ask. You did note the date on which
> >>> that announcement appeared, right?
> >>
> >> Yeah. I do not have to look at it again to tell you it was dated
> >> April 1st 2005 :-). But it is ok you asked, I could have overlooked
> >> it in a hurry. But, well, Arduinos with 512 bytes or ram, just think
> >> of it, putting Cobol on it, what an achievement would it be...
> >>
> > But Cobol is just not the same with out some spinning tape drives.
> > Ben.
> 
> Talking of spinning tape drives : anyone remember IBM's TAPESORT ?
> 
> On the 1401 a disksort was almost useless, bearing in mind that the 1311
> diskdrive only could accomodate 2 million characters.
> 
> One night, the job was to sort the wages for a large numers of factory
> workers. The job used to take 3-4 hours, so the operator went home for a
> quick nap, intending to return at 4 in the morning, so he could finish the job.
> However, the tape sort had aborted as there was a hard error on one of the
> sort tapes, so he had to start from scratch.
> 
> The factory workers' union had a clause in the agreement, saying that if the
> wages were not paid by 10 am, those who had not received the wages,
> would strike until they had.
> 
> The result of that nights sleep was therefore that as soon as some 25
> envelopes had been printed, they would be taken off the printer, filled with
> notes and coins (we are speaking of the 1970's, they would be put into a cab,
> speeded to the factory, and delivered to the workers. By 2 PM everybody
> was working again. The operator was not very popular, and he never went
> home again to take a nap while "working"
> 
> /Nico

What fun what joy. When I worked with a Honeywell H3200, a 1401 clone.
Ours had 20Mb disks and really odd very high speed 1200bpi NRZI tape that nothing else would read .
Running a tape sort was a joy to watch, especially when it used the backward read...
We did use the disk sort. It was called DSORT6 and was not very reliable.
The instructions said:-

"If a DSORT6 job fails try running in a larger partition. If it still fails try it a smaller partition"

Dave