Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1361

glen herrmannsfeldt

i worked at a place around 1980 that had 180 terminals on 110 baud lines . i forget what the terminals were called but all the communication was 6 bit. part of the reason for that, i guess, was lack of communication speed. not sure if the code was called BCDIC or not.

OS was PARS-F and the communications controller (only one controller) was called SYSTEM-7. the name always sounded to me like it had come out of the US space program. until 1979 or so the MF had been a 360-50 which they replaced with a 370-138, i suppose because of maintenance issues.

this SYSTEM-7 got booted from a little cbuttette tape. and supposedly you could 'SYSGEN' a new one if anything changed, but nobody there could remember the procedure for that or even if they had the programs to do it. it also had a Telex typewriter with a paper tape that had gone out of use. i tried to avoid the thing but since i was supposed to be in charge of software i had to ask "where's the backup?". there wasn't any that we could find. the tape cbuttette looked like the same as stereo players used, so i went to Radio Shack, bought a new deck and some blanks, made the copies and they booted OK. sent a couple out to the offsite 'tape' vault. lucky we never had to re-configure the network.

the other thing i remember is that the SYSTEM-7 which was about the same dimensions as a 360-30 was a colour i hadn't seen from IBM before, a kind of green.

even though i had no background in it, i thought PARS-F was neat in several ways. it was the 'financial' version of the airline PARS. only a couple of record types, but had the ability to duplicate records across several drives so that you could get one from another drive if the first was busy, but application programmers didn't have to bother with that stuff. i think the 'plane' record became a 'branch' record in the financial version and the 'reservation' record in our case became a 'loan' record. regret having pushed a few app pgmrs around, just for fun, because all they really needed to know was a handful of instructions, MVC, AP and so forth, no linkage or IO knowledge needed and the slightest buttembly error would trip them up.

even though that network was slow, i believe it had been a pretty impressive network for its day (early 1970's), running from the east coast right up to the Yukon. branch office in Whitehorse planned for week's downtime first week of every January as it was located just off the lobby of the local hotel where the miners had there New Year's riot every year. i heard of another 360-50 in St. Louis that reputedly had 1,500 terminals.

in a couple of years, got a number of unsolicited job calls from all over. complete strangers but i guess word got around. could have travelled the world.

pc