big announcement for Friday: I have acquired a datacenter that has not been touched since approximately 2002, and is FULL of old 80s/90s/2000s IBM mainframe equipment.
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big announcement for Friday: I have acquired a datacenter that has not been touched since approximately 2002, and is FULL of old 80s/90s/2000s IBM mainframe equipment. mainframes, disk arrays, tape drive strings, network processor boxes, and more!
all will be photographed (and posted here), also videographed!
the equipment is being moved to my place, where pubvm.org will be ran on an actual IBM System/370 mainframe!!!!
this is a six-sigma event, this is unfathomable rarity omg
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@wec You gotta be kidding! Spill it, is it a ES/9000? jaw: dropped!!!
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@wec You gotta be kidding! Spill it, is it a ES/9000? jaw: dropped!!!
buncha S/390 G3s, G5s, and original Zs. craploads of 3270 and 3174 too lol (also two 3745s and two 3172s)
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buncha S/390 G3s, G5s, and original Zs. craploads of 3270 and 3174 too lol (also two 3745s and two 3172s)
@wec 3745!!! i am so excited!!!
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@wec I'm starting to think 80s computer hardware is our generation's answer to "basement full of model trains"
@WizardOfDocs @wec "But you can actually do shit with vintage computers!"
Do you do anything with those computers once you restore them?
"...no, but I--"
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@WizardOfDocs @wec "But you can actually do shit with vintage computers!"
Do you do anything with those computers once you restore them?
"...no, but I--"
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@wec I'm starting to think 80s computer hardware is our generation's answer to "basement full of model trains"
@WizardOfDocs @wec What about 90s computer hardware?
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@wec @WizardOfDocs Glad to see there continues to be exceptions to the rule
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@wec @WizardOfDocs Glad to see there continues to be exceptions to the rule
the next outrageous project is going to be to migrate my mastodon to one running on a VAX 4000… far slower than an S/390 G3 (which clocks faster than an Alpha 21264, which ran my previous mastodon)
CC: @WizardOfDocs@wandering.shop
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R relay@relay.mycrowd.ca shared this topic
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@wec I'm starting to think 80s computer hardware is our generation's answer to "basement full of model trains"
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@wec OMG the first programming I ever did was on a 370 and all that JCL!
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@wec You need to acquire a Bond Villain chair and a fluffy white cat for your mainframe lair. Just saying.
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@wec 3745!!! i am so excited!!!
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@wec I'm starting to think 80s computer hardware is our generation's answer to "basement full of model trains"
@WizardOfDocs @wec Something like this?
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@wec I'm starting to think 80s computer hardware is our generation's answer to "basement full of model trains"
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@wec OMG the first programming I ever did was on a 370 and all that JCL!
@SamanthaJaneSmith @wec Way back in the depths of time one of the folks at Interactive Systems (the first commercial Unix company, circa 1980) wrote a JCL interpreter and job processor for us by those who wanted to treat Unix as a batch processing machine. We copied the job pages and other stuff from UCLA's data center. It was quite impressive - an entire JCL deck just to copy a file, including several pages of resulting printout.
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Just bear in mind that you can't get spare parts or maintenance for 3745s any more. (The $Dayjob quartet (split over two datacentres for resilience) were finally shut down after this moose retired; when the last remaining user "You can't shut us down, it's Safety Critical!" was advised of the running cost for their _eight_ sessions, and they would be charged for licenses, power, aircon & maintenance...) I spent 4 years trying to persuade them to switch to TCP/IP. 3:O#>
🤬 🤬 🤬 🤬
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@SamanthaJaneSmith @wec Way back in the depths of time one of the folks at Interactive Systems (the first commercial Unix company, circa 1980) wrote a JCL interpreter and job processor for us by those who wanted to treat Unix as a batch processing machine. We copied the job pages and other stuff from UCLA's data center. It was quite impressive - an entire JCL deck just to copy a file, including several pages of resulting printout.
@karlauerbach @wec Oh yes! I can imagine although I don't know why anyone would want to do that. Although I do remember some really complex JCL for when the 370 acted as a front end for a Cray 1s... That was horrendous and generated a few forests of LP paper with stack overflow errors... I am going to have nightmares tonight!
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buncha S/390 G3s, G5s, and original Zs. craploads of 3270 and 3174 too lol (also two 3745s and two 3172s)
@wec Wait, are you gonna outdo me on 3174s now? I thought I had cornered the market! (Had 20+ at one point, down to like 12)
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@karlauerbach @wec Oh yes! I can imagine although I don't know why anyone would want to do that. Although I do remember some really complex JCL for when the 370 acted as a front end for a Cray 1s... That was horrendous and generated a few forests of LP paper with stack overflow errors... I am going to have nightmares tonight!
@SamanthaJaneSmith @wec We did the JCL-on-Unix thing for the fun of it - and to show people who did not comprehend time sharing.
I got really good at JCL - I was doing satellite stuff and we had compilation jobs that could take 18 to 24 hours. So I rebuilt the JCL to optimize things and got it down to roughly 6 to 8 hours. Most people at that time did not realize that for sequential files - like compiler intermediary files - tape was much faster than disk. So I had umpteen tape drives spinning away. (Each run produced a mountain of printout - about eight feet high!!)
Another yuck-thing we did was to put the Unix swap onto a DecTape. Poor tape drive, but it did work.
BTW, out at the Livermore labs we used an old CDC 7600 and an obsolete Cray 1 to manage our tape library for the newer Crays. (I ported Unix onto those machines.)
