If we're going back to 1st computers I can trump you all by virtue of age alone.
My 1st was an IBM 360/50 worth several million dollars, though I didn't own it of course.
I was employed straight out of London University studying Maths and Physics, as a computer operator and spent a while loading tapes and card decks, and mounting 15Kg disc packs on banks and banks of disc drives, whilst learning the business and studying 360 assembler.
There was no such thing as a computer degree or even a whisper in schools about what computers were, never mind the mysterious arts of programming them.
My model 50 was one of 4 brand new computers in a rapidly expanding machine room the size of an aircraft hanger, with a suspended floor under which were miles of cables the thickness of your arm, in an arctic gale of air conditioning which, if it were to fail meant an instant shut-down of all systems before the CPUs cooked and all the disc heads crashed.
The system had a gigantic 512k main storage (RAM to you) and ran the company's customer order processing. The operator I/O interface was a modified IBM golfball typewriter with a continuous sheet feed, and jobs were run from punch-card decks on an OS which was emulating the previous generation of mainframe (7010) for which the processing software was written.
Shortly after I joined, they wrote an application which ran the emulator in 1 partition of the 360 MFT OS (Multi-programming with a Fixed number of Tasks).
MFT was configured by the operator at bootstrap with as many partitions as needed for the workload and size of task (one for the reader at 8k, two for the printers at 14k each, the main one for the production processing, and a couple of others for the operators and production programmers to run test/maintenance jobs.
A normal job would involve mounting 24 tapes on one of the 16 drives which read in all the order information (teleprocessed in from acrosss the globe to another model 50 which was 50yds away across the machine room and was the only one linked to the outside world. It did nothing but send and receive data to and from tape to every corner of the planet).
Once all the data was input, the system would cogitate and ruminate for an average of 8 hours (a nice easy shift for some lucky soul) before spewing out another couple of dozen tapes of production/shipping instructions to the manufacturing plants, which would be wheeled across to the network connected machine for transmission.
Every interaction with the machine had the repetitive sequence
r 00,"i $3p" to print
r 00,"i $3d" to display
etc etc because you were talking to partition 00 of MFT, in which was the emulator program which was interupted with the "i" to receive a button push emulation "$3" of e.g. the print button.
You will never meet in your lifetime, anyone who can type r 00,"i $3 as fast as me.
Having done it a million times a day (it seemed like it), the characters just flew onto the paper without mental consciousness. Even the punch-girls whose fingers were a constant blur when typing alpha-numerical input couldn't match me because of the esoteric nature of the phrase, involving multiple shifts and special characters.
Funny what special (useless) skills one develops in a lifetime.
That was 1969, the year of the first moon landing, the year the Beatles were still a group, when 1 production cycle lasted 24-36 hours to process data I could probably knock-off in lotus 123 on my new PC in a minute or two. (and store the whole machine room-full database on a CD ROM).
My 1st was an IBM 360/50 worth several million dollars, though I didn't own it of course.
I was employed straight out of London University studying Maths and Physics, as a computer operator and spent a while loading tapes and card decks, and mounting 15Kg disc packs on banks and banks of disc drives, whilst learning the business and studying 360 assembler.
There was no such thing as a computer degree or even a whisper in schools about what computers were, never mind the mysterious arts of programming them.
My model 50 was one of 4 brand new computers in a rapidly expanding machine room the size of an aircraft hanger, with a suspended floor under which were miles of cables the thickness of your arm, in an arctic gale of air conditioning which, if it were to fail meant an instant shut-down of all systems before the CPUs cooked and all the disc heads crashed.
The system had a gigantic 512k main storage (RAM to you) and ran the company's customer order processing. The operator I/O interface was a modified IBM golfball typewriter with a continuous sheet feed, and jobs were run from punch-card decks on an OS which was emulating the previous generation of mainframe (7010) for which the processing software was written.
Shortly after I joined, they wrote an application which ran the emulator in 1 partition of the 360 MFT OS (Multi-programming with a Fixed number of Tasks).
MFT was configured by the operator at bootstrap with as many partitions as needed for the workload and size of task (one for the reader at 8k, two for the printers at 14k each, the main one for the production processing, and a couple of others for the operators and production programmers to run test/maintenance jobs.
A normal job would involve mounting 24 tapes on one of the 16 drives which read in all the order information (teleprocessed in from acrosss the globe to another model 50 which was 50yds away across the machine room and was the only one linked to the outside world. It did nothing but send and receive data to and from tape to every corner of the planet).
Once all the data was input, the system would cogitate and ruminate for an average of 8 hours (a nice easy shift for some lucky soul) before spewing out another couple of dozen tapes of production/shipping instructions to the manufacturing plants, which would be wheeled across to the network connected machine for transmission.
Every interaction with the machine had the repetitive sequence
r 00,"i $3p" to print
r 00,"i $3d" to display
etc etc because you were talking to partition 00 of MFT, in which was the emulator program which was interupted with the "i" to receive a button push emulation "$3" of e.g. the print button.
You will never meet in your lifetime, anyone who can type r 00,"i $3 as fast as me.
Having done it a million times a day (it seemed like it), the characters just flew onto the paper without mental consciousness. Even the punch-girls whose fingers were a constant blur when typing alpha-numerical input couldn't match me because of the esoteric nature of the phrase, involving multiple shifts and special characters.
Funny what special (useless) skills one develops in a lifetime.
That was 1969, the year of the first moon landing, the year the Beatles were still a group, when 1 production cycle lasted 24-36 hours to process data I could probably knock-off in lotus 123 on my new PC in a minute or two. (and store the whole machine room-full database on a CD ROM).
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