On Sun, Jun 4, 2023 at 05:01 PM, Harold Grovesteen wrote:
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On the contrary. ?IBM made excellent manuals, the best of the industry. ?They do require some knowledge as the foundation. ?How did most of us get that knowledge? ?It was by trial and error and asking others who already had it. ?Learning by doing mostly. ?And you have an advantage. ?For most of us there were only a handful of people that we could ask. ?Because most sites, particularly the DOS/VS shops, had maybe a dozen or less people working with the computer. ?(There could be dozens or more people punching cards for use with the computer. ?They essentially just typed all day. ?Literally typed all day.) ?There was no Internet. ?No Google. ?No Wikipedia. ?For you, you have this forum of people who have come before you and can answer just about any question you will have for some time.
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I agree with you. I am privileged because I have not only lots of books and manuals, but also websites with detailed explanations like Jay Maynard's, YouTube channels, and even ChatGPT! :)
I cannot express how grateful I am for all the responses from you guys, because my peers don't want to know anything about computers of the past. They think it's a silly idea.
Go to the bitsavers site. ?Download as many DOS/VS and assembler related manuals you can find. ?If you do not need it today, you may very well need it tomorrow. ?That is what we did in the day. ?The manual (in paper) might sit on the shelf for ages. ?Then something would come up and we would read it. ?It would help in figuring out why something worked the way it did, or why it didn't work at all.
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Done and done. I have saved all manuals from 360 and 370 folders. :)
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I will give you one about DOS/VS. ?For a while I had a job at a site in Orlando, FL. ?We had those slow speed circuits to customers sites all around the state of Florida. ?In the summer, Florida has a lot of thunderstorms. ?We could follow the path of the storm (and to some degree predict when it would hit us.) based upon which remote locations went down due to the storm. ?Losing power was a common occurrence then in the 70's in Florida. ?This would allow us a chance to shut down the system normally without it crashing due to a power loss at our site. ?Things could actually break due to those events. ?Some could require a maintenance person from IBM to fix it before things would run again. ?Power outage crashes were definitely to be avoided.
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This is beyond interesting! So you are telling me that back then there were no UPS nor Diesel generators? This is strange, considering the cost of mainframe.
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Very exciting!
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Indeed!!
Best wishes,
Andre
