Hi Fran,
Has anyone checked the professor's program? What if it contains mistakes? I believe that mainframe time was quite expensive.
Best wishes,
Andre
toggle quoted message
Show quoted text
On Sun, Jun 4, 2023 at 12:32 AM, Fran Hensler wrote:
Andre asked:? “Why did night shifts exist?”
?
The basic answer is that compared to today’s computers the IBM 360 and 370 computers were quite slow.? You just could not get all of the work done during the day.
?
We had a physics professor that was trying to prove something (What, I don’t know) but he had a Fortran program that would run all night 6 pm to 7:30 am and it did not produce his answer so we had to kill it.
He kept trying to make it more efficient and the same thing would happen every night, it never finished.? Then we tried running it from 6? pm Friday night until 7:30 am Monday morning and it still didn’t complete.
?
So I took on the task of modifying his program to output intermediate results before we killed the program and then be able to read in those intermediate results when we restarted program the next night evening.? So we ran his program every night for about six weeks and he still didn’t get the results he wanted so he finally gave up.? “Those were the days, my friend.”
?
?
|
|
/Fran Hensler at Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania USA for 52 years??????
mailto:RockFox@...?? ?
?????????????????"Yes, Virginia, there is a Slippery Rock"
?
|
?
?
Hi Steve!
This is so cool! Do you have any more stories about working on 370? What type of programs usually was batched through the day? Business stuff? Scientific?
I know that ENIAC was used to compute trajectories for artillery. UNIVAC helped with census and also tried to forecast weather and election results.
After that a lot of Business companies adopted computers for calculating employee wages and stock lists.
This is ok, but i want to know how much time would it take to compute one of this tasks, how often they used to appear? Why night shifts existed?
Best wishes,
Andre
On Sat, Jun 3, 2023 at 10:15 PM, Steve Shepherd wrote:
As an operator I learnt assembler on a 370/138 on dos/vs after reading Sharon K Tuggle’s Assembler Language Programming book. On night shifts I would squeeze in a few programs in BG.?
To drive it all home I wrote a version of Star Trek after playing a basic version on a Rank Xerox Sigma 9 on a previous contract.
Anyway, the program output was on the system console and caused no end of problems the next day when the (real) programmers couldn’t find their error messages because of a full console log.
the boss came to me the next day and I thought I was for the chop, but instead they offered me the vacant Systems Programmer job, which of course I readily accepted!
