Higher Education places still use mainframes
Hi all, History of both computers in general and now the Internet have been an interest of mine...
From time to time, for old times sake, I fire up tn3270 and connect to my alma mater to see the VM logon screen. It's still there. I looked at the course catalog and it seems the main CS course that used to be taught using it (something called 'large systems laboratory' where they made the poor CS majors write an editor in S-360 buttembly!) is no longer offered. I also see the prof who used to offer it is no longer there. Not too surprised, he was fairly old when I was there twenty years ago. Hope he's enjoying his retirement somewhere.
snip other advice It is very unkind to give wrong advice to unsuspected losers. DF's and RF's were fast, but not all that reliable. Once upon a time (1976, IIRC), when...
As an aside, when I was an IBM co-op in the early 80s, the internal network had hundreds of nodes, and a lot of the sysops would put a lot of time into making cool, colorful logon screens. So, us lowly co-ops would do an early form of web surfing: we'd bring up the screen used to select the node to log on to, and pick names at random and connect to them just to see the logon screen. I remember the systems in Paris had a cool Eifel Tower in the French Tricolor color scheme. We used to chuckle about how we were getting paid while we did that - early form of web surfing indeed!
--lw--