28-04-2011, 12:49 PM
Took me back, not so much the home machines but long before.
My first time with an ICL 1902T running George III, no screens then just Teletypes. Then came the Dual ICL 2970 and screens to communicate with it. A huge 12MB of main store running VME/B with meep and signet, this allowed us to split the machine and run one half emulating George III, the hardware split was achieved by a space age huge panel (SCP) assigning all hardware to different configs.We had a huge network of terminals the wonderful 7501 as seen on many a late 70's sci-fi show.
Then the ICL 2966 2968 and finally the quad node 3980 with VISA cube (VME inoperable system access) still running VME, the cube was like ORAC from blakes 7. When the system was dead not bootable, this one unit was guaranteed to be running, from there you could gain access and diagnose the system condition and build your way out until full system access could be established, ahh the days of base and superstructure support. I will never forget the huge washing machine sized EDS200 disk drives yep 200MB and they were removable as and when programs required. All these taking up an entire floor of a huge modern office block
Then moving on to unix systems with SUN/OS Solaris, DRSNX, UNIXO, PERQ's the GUI had arrived, ever getting smaller and more powerful until they finally took up a small corner of the floor the old Mainframe used to occupy. During this time the PC arrived and was mainly used to hook up to these systems with terminal emulation packages. I remember the PC processors coming out what seemed like at weekly intervals 8088, 8086, 286, 386, 486, SX & DX choice, maths co- processor or not, the Pentium1, pentium2, who remembers the ISA-BUS, DOS DRDOS. My first PC was the Amstrad PC1512 with GEM desktop and no hard disk just 5.44 floppies which needed swapping about as the OS required.
BBS's, Janet prior to the Internet and Compuserve connecting with dial-up modems 2400, 9600, 28k, 56k Baud rates, the advance of networks Token Ring which was able to transmit data at 4Mbps, 10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX, and 1000BASE-T, running at 10 Mbit/s, 100 Mbit/s, and 1000 Mbit/s (1 Gbit/s), respectively. When I first used the internet there was nothing much on it, mainly documents, I remember Ebay starting up and there was hardly much for sale. Novell Netware 3 with Bindary services, Netware 4 and the NDS (directory services) concept, Microsoft NT server was around but not considered of much use.
The inevitable rise of Microsoft, Windows 2 (bet not many of you remember that) windows 3, windows 3.11, windows 95, windows 98, Windows ME, windows XP and the advent of Windows server 2000 and Active directory (hmm directory services now where did I see that before) by which time the old mainframe was long gone as was Novell and to some degree Solaris. Eventually the whole lot went the room was empty, where was it? all hosted off-shore and you guessed it all running Windows Server.
Incredibly from when I started at the age of 16 with the 1902T teletype mainframe, to the final project to move it all offshore connected by VPNS/MPLS at the age of 44, was 28 years, an amazing revolution and journey that took place before my eyes.
p.s
I fondly remember the time before e-mails, where one could go on leave for two weeks and not return to 800 e-mails, I kid you not!!!
Chris
My first time with an ICL 1902T running George III, no screens then just Teletypes. Then came the Dual ICL 2970 and screens to communicate with it. A huge 12MB of main store running VME/B with meep and signet, this allowed us to split the machine and run one half emulating George III, the hardware split was achieved by a space age huge panel (SCP) assigning all hardware to different configs.We had a huge network of terminals the wonderful 7501 as seen on many a late 70's sci-fi show.
Then the ICL 2966 2968 and finally the quad node 3980 with VISA cube (VME inoperable system access) still running VME, the cube was like ORAC from blakes 7. When the system was dead not bootable, this one unit was guaranteed to be running, from there you could gain access and diagnose the system condition and build your way out until full system access could be established, ahh the days of base and superstructure support. I will never forget the huge washing machine sized EDS200 disk drives yep 200MB and they were removable as and when programs required. All these taking up an entire floor of a huge modern office block
Then moving on to unix systems with SUN/OS Solaris, DRSNX, UNIXO, PERQ's the GUI had arrived, ever getting smaller and more powerful until they finally took up a small corner of the floor the old Mainframe used to occupy. During this time the PC arrived and was mainly used to hook up to these systems with terminal emulation packages. I remember the PC processors coming out what seemed like at weekly intervals 8088, 8086, 286, 386, 486, SX & DX choice, maths co- processor or not, the Pentium1, pentium2, who remembers the ISA-BUS, DOS DRDOS. My first PC was the Amstrad PC1512 with GEM desktop and no hard disk just 5.44 floppies which needed swapping about as the OS required.
BBS's, Janet prior to the Internet and Compuserve connecting with dial-up modems 2400, 9600, 28k, 56k Baud rates, the advance of networks Token Ring which was able to transmit data at 4Mbps, 10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX, and 1000BASE-T, running at 10 Mbit/s, 100 Mbit/s, and 1000 Mbit/s (1 Gbit/s), respectively. When I first used the internet there was nothing much on it, mainly documents, I remember Ebay starting up and there was hardly much for sale. Novell Netware 3 with Bindary services, Netware 4 and the NDS (directory services) concept, Microsoft NT server was around but not considered of much use.
The inevitable rise of Microsoft, Windows 2 (bet not many of you remember that) windows 3, windows 3.11, windows 95, windows 98, Windows ME, windows XP and the advent of Windows server 2000 and Active directory (hmm directory services now where did I see that before) by which time the old mainframe was long gone as was Novell and to some degree Solaris. Eventually the whole lot went the room was empty, where was it? all hosted off-shore and you guessed it all running Windows Server.
Incredibly from when I started at the age of 16 with the 1902T teletype mainframe, to the final project to move it all offshore connected by VPNS/MPLS at the age of 44, was 28 years, an amazing revolution and journey that took place before my eyes.
p.s
I fondly remember the time before e-mails, where one could go on leave for two weeks and not return to 800 e-mails, I kid you not!!!
Chris
