[Gllug] Crashes (owing to the heatwave?)

Sat Aug 9 00:22:05 UTC 2003

On Fri 08 Aug, Peter Ball wrote:
> 

> > 
> About 1970 I used to work on an ICL clone of an IBM 360 - 32k of core 
> was 6' x 19" rack, the cpu was another one and the final rack was the 
> disk control for 2 removal hard disk drives which looked like washing 
> machines and the 10meg ( I think) removable disk drives where like 
> double high dustbin lids in their cases (6 platters is I remember 
> correctly. - they don't make them like that now - thank god.
> 

   About 1961-2 my school took me to see the National Physical Laboratory,
and their pride and joy consisted of a large number of diecast boxes, each
with a pair of glowing valves. The MTBF was about 20 minutes, and it took
about 2 hours to calculate Pi to 30 decimal places.
   Friends worked night shifts as operators looking after local main frames
in the early seventies, feeding in punched cards or paper tape, and from
what they said many of their efforts were in vain because of bugs in the new
software.

-- 
Chris Bell

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