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Ask HN: Questions for two 40 year IBM Mainframe repair and programmers

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Re: Ask HN: Questions for two 40 year IBM Mainframe repair and programmers

#21

Post by mdaniel »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #5
markus_zhang wrote: post #3

I'd very much like the two gentlemen to sit down and write a memoir about their mainframe days. The older technologies are particularly fascinating. It doesn't have to be a book, but if it is then they can crowd fund.

Also might simply let them talk and record it. Someone could later make a transcript.

https://storycorps.org/about/ is the formalized version of that, as well as archiving the stories in the Library of Congress. They air every Friday morning on my local NPR station, and the stories they air are very, very diverse so I'm of the impression they'll take anything they can get in the vein of preserving first-hand accounts of "the way it was"

Re: Ask HN: Questions for two 40 year IBM Mainframe repair and programmers

#22

Post by fuzzer371 »

What was it like "volunteering to become a programmer" back in those days? Did you know what you were getting into, or did it just sound better than working in the mail room? Was "Programmer" a well respected job at the time? Were you seen as a sort of magician working on the mainframe? Or the equivalent of a "grease monkey" changing oil in a car?

Re: Ask HN: Questions for two 40 year IBM Mainframe repair and programmers

#23

Post by helf »

Oh wow. The Goodyear Plant must be the one in Gadsden AL which is my home town.

I would love to hear what they think of the advances in technology from when they started till now; on the software side: which machine series they liked dealing with the /least/ and wich the most and why. What operating systems they liked the most.

Any fun anecdotes about user issues, idiotic design quirks they dealt with etc.

Also, if they have any old ephemeral like notebooks, manuals, etc? That sort of thing would be a treasure to scan in and send to archive.org and bitsavers!

Re: Ask HN: Questions for two 40 year IBM Mainframe repair and programmers

#27

Post by graymatters »

Given what they’ve seen almost 60 years ago and today - can they extrapolate what will the computing field look like in another 60 years? What tools/techniques/methods from the past do they miss the most? Which of these do they think could/should be adapted to current realities and used to greater effect? What are their top 3 do’s and don’ts from those times?

Re: Ask HN: Questions for two 40 year IBM Mainframe repair and programmers

#28

Post by norwayjose »

pixelmonkey wrote: post #19
norwayjose wrote: post #2

I worked as a field engineer on Honeywell mainframes in the late 1970s and later moved into programming so I'm always keen on hearing about the good old days when computers looked impressive. I'd be interested in hearing about their most challenging debugging problems. I'd also like to hear about how your grandfather serviced core memories back in the day. Honeywell core memories had spare bits built in which made is…

My Dad worked at Honeywell on mainframes in the 1970s, too. In NY. In case the last name rings a bell: https://amontalenti.com/contact

I worked in the northern VA district. On weekends we also had to cover DC and parts of MD which was a wide area to cover. Once I was at a site in VA and got a call at the Naval Academy which was over 100 miles away. I wasn't able to make the obligatory 2 hour response time for that call.

Re: Ask HN: Questions for two 40 year IBM Mainframe repair and programmers

#29

Post by norwayjose »

zed716 wrote: post #8

I'm curious in regards to repairs (and perhaps this is just stupidity on my part): Were spare parts for repairs kept on-site, did they have to be ordered/shipped, or did your grandfather have a, er, service truck with parts, etc?

For Honeywell mainframes, the maintenance contract required an onsite office for field engineers. In those offices were stored spare parts (mostly for peripheral devices), larger tools such as oscilloscopes, and the repair documentation which took up a lot of space. The CPUs for Honeywell mainframes contained about 80 large circuit boards (about 12" square as I recall) which were too expensive to have a full set of spares on each site. For those, we had several district offices with more extensive parts departments. Field engineers had to carry a small toolkit with them which in addition to traditional tools contained soldering irons and wire-wrap tools.
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