Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

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I had both. At work VS/9 on a series 90 or a 4381 with a large number of people hanging off the back, at home a BBC Micro with two floppies (once I could afford them) and a 128K Solidisk.

Between those three I couldn't wait to get home to get something done.

The edit-compile-test cycle on those mainframes was so ridiculously long it would be a good day if you got three turnarounds, on a bad day you got none. Compared to seconds for my home stuff. Shortly after that I got an Atari 68K machine and that felt like unlocking God mode.

Mainframes are powerful in the same way that tractors are powerful: you can do an awful lot of work if you have an awful lot of work.

If you are just programming or learning then something smaller is far more effective, on top of that the lack of resources will teach you all you need to know about efficiency.

> you can do an awful lot of work if you have an awful lot of work.

This is a great way to put the trouble with lots of complex tooling, not just oversized computers. Thanks!

I recall at my fist job one of the engineers coming into out terminal room and logging onto an ICL mainframe at AWE and sighing when she saw 48 jobs in front of hers in the queue.

Ah yes, George OS and the ICL 29xx series, fun times.

Had great fun with the SPV command, used that to code up a keylogger. Was able to pull up a spoof login screen on all the terminals using that and able to pass off input as commands and the end user would be none the wiser.

Other great find was that back then discs were big and expensive and not as reliable, so they rotated the discs to even out the wear. They also didn't fully erase them and if you created a file, you had to specify to zero it as an option. This allowed you to create a file, dump the contents and read what was previously upon the discs. Now as the operator console would create a journal log of everything typed (including login and password - everything typed) and factoring in disc rotation, then it was possible as a user to create files upon what was a disc previously used for console journal logging and read the contents. This yielded the username and password of the system admin at college and even today recall that wonderful admin/5588 username and password.

Fun times indeed.

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