[Coco] OT: Has anyone worked with "big iron" sysems

[Roger Merchberger]

Rumor has it that Jim Cox may have mentioned these words:
>I'm curious to know if anyone on this list has worked with so-called "big 
>iron" systmes.

/me raises hand...

Worked for EDS (GM) back in '89/90 - Loved my job, hated Duhtroit. Before 
moving back to the Sault (the feminine component of the equation won over - 
my GF at the time is now my wife of nearly 14 years) I was working on 
transferring within EDS, I was looking for jobs in either Plano/Dallas TX, 
Ottawa or Oshawa Ontario, or Rudesheim, Germany (as I speak a little German).

The boxen I worked with was primarily IBM 3090 & Amdahl 5890 mainframes, 
3480 tape drives (but we still had some 9-track reels), 3390? DASD units, 
but I also worked on a few AS/400 systems, and even saw a few of the 
*early* Suns (back when they were 68K based!) and that's when I fell in 
love with the Sun terminal font - I've always thought it was "elegant."

Yes, I learned JCL - still have most of my listings from 'way back when' & 
my training books from EDS - they sure did know how to train their people. 
I worked on MVS, MVS/XA and a few others I don't remember quite so well...

What I liked is that EDS "never held me back" so to speak. If you wanted to 
learn something new, they didn't stop you, and you could even use some 
company facilities (paper, plotters, inkjet printers back when they were 
"kewl" [read: *expensive*]) as long as you didn't go nutz with it. I 
learned CADAM 2.1 on the mainframes with *biiig* digitizers (measured in 
feet, not inches! ;-) and *biiig* CRTs, and made printouts on a 42" 
electrostatic plotter.

One time on the night shift which could get boring at 3-4AM, I went into 
the tape library and figured out how much tape storage we'd had in there. 
Over 17 Terabytes! Remember, this was over 15 years ago! I never did figure 
out how much DASD (Direct Access Storage Device - "Hard Drive" for the PC 
world) was online at the time, but the biggest IBM DASD units we had ( the 
3390K - IIRC, of course) was 7.5G per disk pack, 6 packs per 19" rack, and 
we had a few rows of that series (not including earlier ones with smaller 
capacity packs) -- a *lot* of storage back then, especially when you 
consider a 40Meg drive was pretty big in the PC world then.

Anywho, enough of waxing poetic about my halcyon days of youth...
;-)

Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger

--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger   | "Bugs of a feather flock together."
sysadmin, Iceberg Computers |           Russell Nelson
zmerch at 30below.com          |