Starting this new topic for discussion. Some of what others and myself have posted elsewhere before (see below list), may as well fit in here at times. I just couldn’t really pick a topic that felt right, so I am starting a fresh new one.
I’ll probably flash it with the latest H.J.Berndt firmware, as some neat little features have been created. Like Morse code, SSTV, and more, of which some will require some modifcations to the hardware. Plenty info from enthousiasts available.
That’s cool. There is something other-worldly about sitting in the dark, late at night and listening to voices from far away. It never loses it’s appeal. And if I manage to pick up Morse, it’s even more mysterious. But maybe that’s just me.
In 1960s England the BBC had a monopoly on radio stations - and they believed pop music was lowbrow and frivolous. They only transmitted a couple of hours worth each week - and even that they begrudged.
If you were young, and wanted to hear the latest sounds, you had to listen to foreign radio stations. By far the most popular was Radio Luxembourg, which broadcast an English language show every night.
Trouble was, they transmitted on AM medium wave - and the distances involved meant you could barely get a signal. It was a rite of passage for a whole generation to have listened to a cheap AM transistor radio late at night (usually in bed), desperately trying to pull an audible signal from the waves of static and phase.
As much as I love the looks and the idea of the ‘minimal’ C64 flip phone, I can’t justify what I’d have to pay for it. Comes down to €500 including shipping, VAT, and all discounts possible, which is without any extras I’d love to add. It would require to be an ‘extra’ phone, which means extra monthly fees for an additional SIM card. I can not use it for some apps I would want on there for banking, secure login to various government site, etc, because that would require side-loading with a lot of trouble if even possible to begin with. I’d also have to get back to using T9 for typing …
This is part - actually only a small part – of a Honeywell DPS 6 mainframe. Needless to say, I do not own one, and I never have - but in the 2000s I was offered one, for free. It was formerly the property of a major engineering company, whose redundant premises were undergoing demolition. Having expressed my admiration of the old computer, I was told I could have it for nothing - all I had to do was arrange to have it taken away.
The trouble was. it occupied two floors of a purpose built office block. It would have cost me a fortune to have it removed, and then where would I have put it?
I had to turn the offer down - and it’s bothered me ever since.
What a difference 25 years makes when it comes to size. I am pretty sure nobody would have been happy housing something like that, not even the Mainframe Kid’s parents back in 2016, who only took care of a ‘small’ one in comparison, the IBM z890 (2004).
Really cool and a shame to often see old stuff like that eventually go to waste, however understandable it may be.
Well I was offered the computer around 2002 - 2005, but it was installed some time in the 1970s - and was completely redundant by the time I got to see it.
Industry is inherently conservative. They stick with what works, they keep kit running as long as possible, and they don’t spend money if they don’t have to.
I know of several large petrochemical plants that are still running their instrumentation, monitoring and control gear on pneumatic (compressed air) systems - essentially technology from the 1920s. The designs are positively ancient - but they work, and they have a proven history of reliability.
Even a museum would have trouble finding good reason to allow one to take up so much floor space. It would most likely remain stored away in the archives somewhere if they did take one. Even calling it “one” sounds wrong… There’s so many units to it.
My son works for a company that was still running win95 until last year. He kept win 95 running as long as possible and then invested an exhaustive amount of time forcing win 95 programs to run on win 11. It works so he succeeded. But the machinery is so old, he sources parts from across Europe where people still have access to old machinery.
Sooner or later they will have to build a new mill. But the price tag is astronomical. It’s assumed they will retire and shut down.
I hear this can be quite common in factories and even certain transport sectors like trains and aviation. I wonder how many of them still use floppy discs
Use this helpful age-old guide: What computer am I buying?
If you can lift it and put it under your desk, it’s a microcomputer. (Hence: Micro-soft)
If you can throw yourself at it and it tips over, it’s a minicomputer.
And if they ask your for the structural engineers’ report for your floor, it’s a mainframe.
Mainframes still exist, governments, banks, and large travel/shops businesses use them today. But they got new ones from IBM, they no longer take up a room. Only the “dumb” ATM screen you see is Windows, but the bank’s internal system behind it is something much faster. When you withdraw money at the ATM, and it does not take a minute, and works 24/7/365, that’s a mainframe. That not “the Cloud”.
One oversized fridge size mainframe is like 32… or 64 machines directly talking to each other at 64 times I/O speed. Not a cluster of 64 PC connected by network cables, that’s too slow!
And in a modern mainframe, you can pull out one of the several CPUs… or one of the RAM sticks… and it keeps working, it just rebalances the workload… If one CPU or RAM fails the self-check, it sends a message to IBM and they send a guy to swap the part while the mainframe is running. No downtime. The modern ones are hard to replace. Cobol devs are all retired by now, but they run Linux apps too.
Many even keep running during earthquakes as long as the uninteruptable power supply is, well, not interrupted. They may fall over, but IBM connects the cables with some slack so that they don’t get pulled out.
(Yes, I spent years sitting in that department next to colleagues telling me these stories)
While in the military, the “computer” was one that had multiple discs in a “disc packs” and you slid the pack into a vertical receptacle. It seemed like a major function was to produce sheets of ASCII art.
When the time comes for the final upload, mainframers are buried face down, nine edge first. (That’s how you insert it. You can see the nine edge in the photo, the bottom edge has 9s.)
“I got an abend (abnormal end=error message), what is a S0C4?” - "For keeping your feet warm "
My father learned keypunch operation in the 1950s, went to work for International Paper in the 1960s, designing the system that weighed trucks in & out of the paper mills. That remained his ongoing project until he retired in the early 1990s. For a time he worked out of Brookley Field in Mobile AL – IP had their telecommunications mainframe installed in a complex there, as it was “bomb-proof” and thus stable enough for the machines. [Bonus: Brookley was where Spielberg filmed the mothership landing sequence for Close Encounters, & my dad snuck around to see the set a time or two.]
There is something other-worldly about sitting in the dark, late at night and listening to voices from far away. It never loses it’s appeal. And if I manage to pick up Morse, it’s even more mysterious. But maybe that’s just me. 
They may fall over, but IBM connects the cables with some slack so that they don’t get pulled out.
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