Any old timers?

[whs]

strollin, did you work at the IBM Santa Therisa plant in SJ? I was i Bldg. 26 in the early 70's.

Bldg 26 was at the main SJ plant which is where I worked. Santa Teresa Lab (now called Silicon Valley Lab) is a programming lab about 5 miles south of what used to be the main SJ plant. The main plant was sold to Hitachi a number of years ago and I'd estimate two-thirds of the buildings have been torn down (including bldg 26).

I know the S.T. Lab was out in the boonies. It was Jim Frame who "built" it. At least he and his crew were the first tenants. I have been there a few times. We called it Jim's turkey farm.
I referred to the plant as the S.T. plant because that's what the whole area used to be called. My house was only a stone throw away (towards the mountains). I worked there (Bldg 26) from 1970 to 74 on VSAM architecture and development. Those were good times. I loved California, but as it was with IBM, you had to move on (20 times in my case and 9 foreign assignments).

 

[strollin]

Another flashback just came to me.

People with dial-up think they have it bad today when they open their browser and have to wait for the modem to connect...

Do modems still use the Hayes methodology for getting commands from the computer?

I know I must have done it manually thousands of times before I got a fancy program that would deal with the dialing.... I would look at the printed list of bbs systems to get the number...

open the session
pause
Type: +++
pause
Type: ATDT5551212

Then wait for the connection. As I recall, I also had to add steps to set parity etc at some sites. There was no auto detection.

Reminds me of when I bought my first modem, a Hayes 1200 baud SmartModem. Paid $300 for it. I knew a buddy that had a modem and we spent an entire evening unsuccessfully trying to get the 2 modems to connect to each other using the Hayes command set. The next day I went back to the store where I bought the modem and asked if they knew anything about something I had heard of called a Bulletin Board. The guy printed out a list of 10 or so BBS numbers. Once you got on to 1 BBS, there were lists of other boards. I spent many hours DLing software from BBSs. Most of it was freeware written in BASIC but some of it was Shareware. Some junk, some useful stuff but all of it was interesting and new.

 

[Little Darwin]

For all the BBSers... Do you remember your favorite BBS?

There seem to be quite a few in this thread that have been in Northern California... Did anyone use the BBS ATT-PAC?

It was a nice BBS in Pleasanton (or somewhere near there) and was where I spent most of my phone time, named for AT&T and Pacific Bell, since as I recall the two founders worked in those places... As I recall I was a "lifetime member" there when I wandered off and started surfing the net.

 

[pacinitaly]

man I'm gettin old

 

[bummpr]

I worked there (Bldg 26) from 1970 to 74 on VSAM architecture and development. Those were good times. I loved California, but as it was with IBM, you had to move on (20 times in my case and 9 foreign assignments).

Thank you for VSAM!!!! What a Brilliant breakthrough technology!!

 

[TheSchaft]

<sigh> I feel old now too.

"How old?"
"I'm so old I carved my first modem out of a block of wood, used a crystal to get online. I can still remember tuning it with the cat whisker, sonny."

(Actually, I did have a crystal radio set waaaay back in the day.)

My first computer experience was in the USAF programming mainframes - Univac 494 and 1108s. Interesting machines, word oriented. Back then you looked at every instruction to optimize and tried to save as much memory as possible.

We only had 256K of core memory, and you could open the back of the machine and see the separate cores with the three (read/write/reset) wires running through them. Dual 494s had 8 tape drives on them, and could record either 7 track or 9 tracks, BCD or EBCDIC. Mass storage was either 1782 drums or FASTRAN systems.I also worked on "terminal" machines - Univac 1004s - they were plugboards that you set up with wires to program. Fun times, fun times.

A few years later I worked on "laptop" systems - from HP, as I recall. Dual 5 1/4 folppies and a Bernolli drive. That was at JPL where you could go and get any software you wanted for free at what we lovingly refered to as "The Candy Store".

It was during that time that I got my first 486. RAM back then was about $600 for 64K, hard drives were about $1 a K (1/2 meg drive cost me $550 I remember.) The good thing was I had moved to Sunnyvale, so there were a lot of "chop shops" that built systems while you waited, literally.

Over the years, I've moved on to P-II, P-3, P-4, and now to an I-3 system. Each one smaller and faster than the last.

Being a packrat, I still have a set of Windows 2.0 and 3.1 (and 3.11) floppies.

I did a lot of programming in ASM when I worked for Univac (after getting out of the AF), then gave it up for a long time - C wasn't as much fun. I got back into it for a while when I discovered Perl, still do a little for my various web pages.

Lot of good memories, lot of late nights.

 

[topCturV]

<sigh> I feel old now too.

(Actually, I did have a crystal radio set waaaay back in the day.)

They were the best.. A trip down memory lane right there.

 

[whs]

I worked there (Bldg 26) from 1970 to 74 on VSAM architecture and development. Those were good times. I loved California, but as it was with IBM, you had to move on (20 times in my case and 9 foreign assignments).

Thank you for VSAM!!!! What a Brilliant breakthrough technology!!

Yeah, and it was a gap filler at the time. Because the San Jose team wanted to develop an access method called AM1, but they could not get it off the ground. As usual, the project kept mushrooming and the cost got out of hand. That's when they called a new team in of which I was a part and we designed VSAM (originally called AM0) in 3 months - in task force mode working 80 hours per week. Then the developers took over and developed an MVS and a DOS/370 version. The latter was later transferred to the German lab where I managed the development groups for about 2 years.