Earthling Posted March 13, 2012 Posted March 13, 2012 Going on shift in the (mainframe) computer room at Cardiff Uni one Monday at 4pm (evening shift 4 -10.30), taking a handover from Day Shift Leader,.... 'There's an aircon engineer out the back (in the plant room), he says he might have to switch the aircon off for five minutes or so. Work-wise is doing some testing on the new Multijob version.' Me: 'Ok, cool, see ya later, have a good one'. Stand around for five minutes, reading the shift diary and half-listening to the systems guy nattering on about stuff that's completely obsolete now, all of a sudden there's a loud bang and CO2 starts pouring out of the fire-suppression system. The systems guy says 'Is it supposed to do that?', 'No, it's not, you'd better get out, quick'. Hit the Emergency Off button, vacate the computer-room, and watch through the windows in the door as the room slowly fills with CO2. I remember, when it was all fixed and the aircon had pumped the room out, everything covered with sticky brown droplets, the ICL engineers going into overdrive to inspect everything, and the air, funnily enough, tasting of lemonade. I miss mainframe operations. Sometimes.
synaesthesia Posted March 13, 2012 Posted March 13, 2012 I got my first PC in the mid 80s, an Amstrad 1640 with a huuuuge 20 meg hard drive and a GEM interface. (Although I had previously had a CPC 6128 running CP/M). 1640.... why does that ring a bell - did it have a hard drive mounted on an expansion card? I think I bought one of those for a mate from a computer fair!
tech_guy Posted March 13, 2012 Posted March 13, 2012 And did anyone else (who's old enough) get sucked in to Lords of Midnight on the Sinclair Spectrum back in 1984: 2
jinnantonnixx Posted March 13, 2012 Posted March 13, 2012 Reel to Reel tape drives with the "suction tubes". Line at a time impact printers with acoustic shielding. That takes me back. I worked on the mainframe versions of IBM AS/400s (B & E series) and occasionally loaded up the reels. I think the E series loader had vacuum pots, but you had to manually spool the tape on the B series. Oh and co-ax concentrators feeding into rack mounted boards. Them was the days. Spectrum>QL>PC (IBM AT/XT/PS/2 Model 50 anyone?)>DEC Vax VMS>IBM AS 400> OS/2/Warp/ > Unix Balance Transputers (what became of them?)> Sun Sparcs>RS/6000>and back to flamin' PCs.
Mcshammer_dj Posted March 13, 2012 Posted March 13, 2012 1640.... why does that ring a bell - did it have a hard drive mounted on an expansion card? I think I bought one of those for a mate from a computer fair! and in those days you had to "park the Hard drive" before you could turn the system off
jinnantonnixx Posted March 13, 2012 Posted March 13, 2012 and in those days you had to "park the Hard drive" before you could turn the system off When tech improved, you could still get the park utils, even though the drives didn't need them. Psychosomatic software.
HarryMonkey Posted March 13, 2012 Posted March 13, 2012 I miss mainframe operations. Sometimes. Me too.
HarryMonkey Posted March 13, 2012 Posted March 13, 2012 1640.... why does that ring a bell - did it have a hard drive mounted on an expansion card? I think I bought one of those for a mate from a computer fair! I believe it may well have done.
januttall Posted March 13, 2012 Posted March 13, 2012 is it bad that im 22 and can recolect with most tho not all of this
2097 Posted March 13, 2012 Posted March 13, 2012 is it bad that im 22 and can recolect with most tho not all of this Im 25 and know most of this . I think doom was installed as standard on most networks. Maybe by the techys lol ? Any one remember RM NETWORKS ?? Jesus i wonder if there still around lol !!! Back in my rebel days of computing . I still remember putting the end of matches onto a floppy disk with nail varnish , putting it in the floopy drive and turn the PC off . Waiting for the next person to turn the machine on for a little fire ( stupid now i look back at it as i imagine i could have killed some one) Also the time i installed a RM username logger , it basically replaced the login prompt for a fake one and logged every ones information . I didnt think it had worked untill the NM called me in a week later and told me it had logged 2 pages of usernames and passwords ! lol
LiamH Posted March 13, 2012 Posted March 13, 2012 I remember me and my cousin making "dens" when we were little and setting up my spectrum complete with monochrome monitor and playing hunt for red October in a beautiful shade of green while pretending we were actually in the submarine The one thing i do remember is the "effect" you got from turning the monitor on and off was amazing at the time ;x
andydis Posted March 13, 2012 Posted March 13, 2012 My Best ICT moments:- KID: playing with BBC micro then switching to DOS college - findng the wall ( or w.exe) that would braodcast on the novell network - finding the college had a BBS system with a modem that could dial out! - using above BBS to get duke nukem on the network - running up 300quid monthly phone bills for the internet Apprenticeship:- watching as it happened all the I LOVE YOU emails come in and kill all mail servers and internet connections CODE RED! ..%c0%af.. in the IIS logs and trying it for ourselves ( and it worked! still does on NT/win2000 sp3)
X-13 Posted March 13, 2012 Posted March 13, 2012 I still have a box of 8 inch floppy disks, and they are the expensive double sided, double density disks too (500kB). [ATTACH=CONFIG]13318[/ATTACH] "Floppy disks" always brings out the Frankie Howerd in me. But that was almost too much.
dwhyte85 Posted March 13, 2012 Posted March 13, 2012 I remember.... Turning Windows 3.11 into a clock and being very upset that I couldn't work out how to fix it, I remember kids at school trying the nail varnish and match head thing... naughty cookbook that had all this. Geocities websites for hax0rz, AOL chat rooms, Duke 3D, Compuserve and a £400.00 phone bill... getting 'the matrix' chat window when I got 'hacked' by downloading a screensaver of a wwf diva... trishstratus.scr ... damn those scrs running as exes. From school I remember really bad image checkers, if you opened a certain hue of pink it'd block you from the network. Net send not being disabled and accidentally sending messages to teachers not just the user in question - got banned for 2 weeks haha. Dodgy websites like football with an extra l getting you in a lot of trouble. HyperOffice - the first document repository around. Everyone sitting around on itsagoal instead of working... people group joining chatrooms and abusing people. Those were the days, I wasn't really into IT then but was great fun to get around the laws of the school, unfortunately then it was alot harder to manage us, a bunch of teenage boys with techs and network managers learning new microsoft technology. The guy who was NM was a very smart guy though, he had the common sense not to be our enemy but friendly as he knew that some of the kids were very good at circumnavigating the systems. I actually miss school!
sparkeh Posted March 13, 2012 Posted March 13, 2012 And did anyone else (who's old enough) get sucked in to Lords of Midnight on the Sinclair Spectrum back in 1984: [ATTACH=CONFIG]13317[/ATTACH] Awsome, awesome game, perhaps one of the best ever made!
elsiegee40 Posted March 13, 2012 Posted March 13, 2012 I miss mainframe operations. Sometimes. I don't miss them cheerfully calling me at 2am because the batch runs had failed ! I know they had to call, but alwys so Bl**dy cheerful about dragging those of us from Tech Support out of bed! No mobile in those days, though I did have a pager. Ghastly thing - batteries always failed in the middle of the night and it would start beeping. Still the operators were always good for copious supplies of food and coffee as I arrived after a drive through Chatham in the early hours of the morning. (Lovely part of the world in the depths of night! The security guard would come out to the car park to meet me! )
synaesthesia Posted March 13, 2012 Posted March 13, 2012 No, but I do remember when it first went in, and myself and a good friend made use of teh free NTL to NTL calls to set up direct modem connections for Red Alert
difinity Posted March 13, 2012 Posted March 13, 2012 Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy text based on the RM Nimbus and PC paint. I don't know if it was a bug or an insecure system but you could get to other user areas through the save feature in PC Paint. copying lines of BASIC out of magazines.
HaleStorm Posted March 13, 2012 Posted March 13, 2012 Lemmings, the Amiga 500, Microsoft Sidewinder gamepad with "tilt control"
jinnantonnixx Posted March 13, 2012 Posted March 13, 2012 I bought a C&VG magazine in December 1982, just before Christmas. I poured over the 'listings' (as they were called) ready to type in the wonderful games that appear from the mysterious code on the magazine's pages. Christmas day in 1982 was entirely spent trying to get the blasted cassette recorder to play the Psion 'Horizons' tape. Oh the joy of 'bat and ball' (a copy of Breakout) made it all worthwhile. Try telling that to the kids these days - they just won't believe you.
Flatpackhamster Posted March 13, 2012 Posted March 13, 2012 Diskworld. 26 disks. [iIRC] I think I still have it knocking around indoors. Yep, I remember those days. Windows for Workgroups and Office 3.11 on 15 floppies apiece, Wing Commander 2 on about 12 floppies. And sure as eggs is eggs, about a year after you'd got them and you tried to do a reinstall, it would fail on about disk 9.
Hawkeyez Posted March 13, 2012 Posted March 13, 2012 My Best ICT moments:- KID: playing with BBC micro then switching to DOS college - findng the wall ( or w.exe) that would braodcast on the novell network - finding the college had a BBS system with a modem that could dial out! - using above BBS to get duke nukem on the network - running up 300quid monthly phone bills for the internet Apprenticeship:- watching as it happened all the I LOVE YOU emails come in and kill all mail servers and internet connections CODE RED! ..%c0%af.. in the IIS logs and trying it for ourselves ( and it worked! still does on NT/win2000 sp3) Running a BBS was a great time, 2 Lines, FidoNet and able to give users an email address at my demon account... fun times.
Mcshammer_dj Posted March 13, 2012 Posted March 13, 2012 When I first started supporting sims it was a dos prorgam using Dbase, with numerous floppy disks sent through from capita for each upgrade
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