MontyVeda
a short-tempered ill-controlled small-minded troll
- Location
- Lancaster... the little city.
I still prefer tiggabytes 
Technology..
- Thread starter keithmac
- Start date
-
- Tags
- technology
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Smokin Joe
Legendary Member
- Location
- Bare headed cyclist, Smoker
In the late sixties when I was an apprentice engineer the firm got a machine controlled by a punched paper tape. It carried out six operations, drilling, reaming, tapping and milling among them, and all the operator had to do was load the work and press start. For a long time only the apprentices were allowed to use it as they could not figure how to work it into the bonus scheme.
Ming the Merciless
There is no mercy
- Location
- Inside my skull
Since we are reminiscing.
I started my IT career as a trainee analyst programmer on system 36 then later mainframes. Magnetic tapes were in use. A few years later I went on call for all our mainframe applications. Part of the training was to spend a week on shift with our IT operations team. When they saw my user ID a groan went up. Apparently every request for an archived tape being mounted required their intervention. I'd recalled a lot of tapes recently. Not long after tape loading and archival was fully automated.
I started my IT career as a trainee analyst programmer on system 36 then later mainframes. Magnetic tapes were in use. A few years later I went on call for all our mainframe applications. Part of the training was to spend a week on shift with our IT operations team. When they saw my user ID a groan went up. Apparently every request for an archived tape being mounted required their intervention. I'd recalled a lot of tapes recently. Not long after tape loading and archival was fully automated.
DCBassman
Guru
- Location
- The lumpy far South West
Yup, think that just might stick!I still prefer tiggabytes
DCBassman
Guru
- Location
- The lumpy far South West
And we might just carry on with petrolbytes and extrabytes!I still prefer tiggabytes
MontyVeda
a short-tempered ill-controlled small-minded troll
- Location
- Lancaster... the little city.
I was thinking more pigletbytes and poohbytes
Ming the Merciless
There is no mercy
- Location
- Inside my skull
I was thinking more pigletbytes and poohbytes
And sticklebytes
DCBassman
Guru
- Location
- The lumpy far South West
Yes! But what IS a sticklebyte? 10 to the...
Ming the Merciless
There is no mercy
- Location
- Inside my skull
Well none of them are ten to the power as they are all multiples of the kilobyte, which is 2 to the power..
Joey Shabadoo
My pronouns are "He", "Him" and "buggerlugs"
It's getting, it's getting, it's getting kinda hectic
Chromatic
Legendary Member
- Location
- Gloucestershire
For amusement value we use to refer to Gb as giggleybytes.
My completely computing-ignorant former neighbour used to refer to them as gigabitches.
Usually when his laptop or internet connection wasn't working.
The last time I was there, ScottishPower's main customer database was on a mainframe with access via terminal. I can still do meter exchanges and tariff updates from muscle memory 12 years later. vim is a doddle compared to that system.
Of course all the GUI applications that were built by contractors that hung off the side of the system were unfailingly rubbish.
Ming the Merciless
There is no mercy
- Location
- Inside my skull
Well it’d be on the mainframe since terminals are just dumb. Mainframes have supported Internet network protocols for some time. So they could just shift it to a browser interface if they wanted to. Mainframes can also easily run windows and Linux stuff if that’s your thing.
As far as I could tell those apps that hung off the side worked by sending fake keystrokes to the mainframe and screen scraping. The system was extremely old - I wonder if they still use it as the backbone for everything, as I believe it predated deregulation which would make it 1989 at the latest, a lot of the features required to support interoperability with other suppliers were literally non-existent.
We needed to use other systems to interop with other suppliers, and there were as many of these as there were use cases.
I don't want to go too much detail other than to say that one of these systems was a directory full of csv files that got FTP'd to a remote server.
A lot of excel was involved, the whole thing was slipshod, and I'm amazed it worked at all.
