Did any of you read dumps looking for error codes to fix?

 

Yes, hundreds of times. I taught classes on dump reading in my younger years.

I felt bad about the paper resources that were used for the dumps and then thrown out by myself and many others...sadly it was the way things were done at the time.

gary

 

I started at Lockheed in 1965, using COBOL on an IBM 7080. We patched our programs with machine language until the source code could be updated and recompiled. You could patch from the console and transfer back to the failed instruction, saving those horrendously long runs of 10-12 hours. The machine had 18 tape drives on 2 channels and it was incredibly cool to see if you could drop all the drive doors simultaneously. Computers were less fun when they removed the lights.

Sent by carrier pigeon

 

of course, that was back when the lights actually meant something.

 

Wow - reading this thread brings back some memories... Back in the day I started working on Burroughs (later UNISYS) mainframes...

• Wrote many lines of RPG code - remember that?
• On some of the earlier mainframes we had a "head per track" drive - with a huge single platter.
• Even an earlier mainframe, had room for 5 "decks". A deck consisted of a program and up to 4 data "files" if you would. If the programs failed just right, there would only be data decks in memory and nothing would move forward...
• Oh and the teletype device that would print endlessly on rolls of paper.
• Does anyone remember DATAPOINT computers? They had a very rudimentary proprietary relational database and could be "networked" together...

Gary, remember the drum inside the Card Punch machines? It would hold the special card that would allow auto tabbing at the press of a key... Good times!

 

 

I started with a DEC that was booted using flip switches and when the paper tape reader came along, we had a party when we got rid of the start up instructions. Moved on to mag tape (what a great improvement) and then to 8" floppies. When 180k 5.25" floppies came out, we figured that nobody would ever create a program big enough to ever fill those. 360k floppies made them obsolete. Then 720k, 3.25 "floppies", and 1.2M DSDD floppies. Nirvana, more space than anyone could ever fill (for about 6 months). My first IBM Model 2 had two 360k floppies but I added a 5 Meg hard drive for only $3000 and thought I'd made a great buy.
Don't miss the days of paper tape, card punch readers, mag tape and convoluted start up boot sequences at all, but that VAX 8500 was a powerhouse.

 

Cut down many trees!

 

I had a slide ruler.

 

Oooh Pickett multi rule??