And now Skoda are at it.

[raleighnut]

My first IT job was at a site where they were running a LeoIII (English Electric), programming in CLEO, converting to an ICT computer in COBOL. This would have been late 1968.

Yeah Dad progressed to 'punch card operator' then went to night school to learn programming, I remember as a kid there were the manuals for Cobol and Fortran, probably others around the house, he went on to be part of the team that wrote the control programs for 2 Nuclear Powerstations (Hartlepool and Heysham) eventually ending up as a dept head and then when GEC closed Whetstone making thousands redundant they moved 20-30 'key personnel' up north to somewhere near Jodrell Bank. Dad was one to get relocated with the company even buying the old house in Enderby.

 

[mikeIow]

I remember watching an engineer do just that in the early 80s. He removed a board from an IBM minicomputer (mini - hah! It was the size of a large wardrobe) fiddled with some DIP switches or something, put it back, and bingo our machine was super-powered.

I deployed the first UNIX box in our local authority (ended up running the biggest Oracle Financials system in Europe at the time).
When I was testing it (#learningit!), I found I could disable a processor.....so I did. Happy in the knowledge that as the usage ramped up, at some point things would start to appear slow to users. When they complained, I could switch the new processor on!

Happy days.

Less happy when the cleaners threw out a large lightweight box....which contained some memory valued around £250k 😳
Literally had the local dump being scoured for a day or so before they had to accept it was lost 😱