Moving servers

[Ojustaboo]

I must be the ye olde grandad of IT as I once worked as a telephone linesman for BT before the mobile telefone came about. Yes that's right, an actual dinasour of the pre ms dos era! Give you all a clue when it was...the computer of the day was the mighty Acorn Atom(!!) and the Sinclair ZX81 (the computer of the future , it was called...turned out to be one of the biggest flops of all time!!!) So me'lads which one of yer has the correct year???

A little earlier than me. Vic 20 had just been superseded by the C64 when I first got into IT, think it was 1986

When I started, our 2nd most important machine was a Sperry Univac. Every week we'd have a morning of training on just how to boot the thing etc. First we had to boot the support processor using something like a 9" floppy and octal keypad. Then we had to say whether to load the op system into low or high memory etc etc.

Just learnt the whole lot off by heart and they replaced it with a Data General where you simply pressed "B" to boot

We also had a Cray supercomputer which at the time was the best around (thing that looks like it has a seat all the way around it). They had a bit of software where you would mount loads of reel to reel tapes, it would spin them so fast that it would play a tune.

At the other end we had things called something like a Gould Sell where we had disks the size of washing machines that held a massive 330MB, if you played the inbuilt chess game, whenever the Sell thought of it's move, all the tapes stopped spinning lol, if memory serves me correct, even had to use punch cards to do certain software loads on it. I also seem to remember that every few months this lady in white overalls would appear and manually clean all the disk platters.

They were the days lol

[bobonthejob]

Wow...ther are lots of us...

@pooface - Not taking any one on at the moment. Yet the work load is intense.....aghhhhhhhhhh

[Conaxthewarrior]

Don't know about The TSR 8009A Eiger [1981] or STC Classic but the phone I had in mind was known as BT's 746 model, reliable but the ear piece was apt to "go" after a few years giving that classic crackle while listening...incidently, I downloaded an mp3 of the 746's ring and now have it as my mobile ringtone!! trouble is, everyone nearby looks at me & thinks "He must be an old git"....!!!!!