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Well I've seen and programmed on Burroughs Corporation Mainframes(IBM Mainframes as well) and have seen an actual Sperry Corporation Univac Mainframe Drum Storage system(Ginormous beast) in actual use! And has anyone here actually played Space Invaders(ASCII Characters used) on a Burroughs TD830 CRT monitor! And modern day Unisys is the merger of those 2 mainframe makers some time ago!

But none here are maybe from that Era that was coming to a close in the late 70s and are not yet qualified to shake their fist and angrily yell at that singular cloud floating in a beautiful blue sky!




In my OS course, in 1969, I wrote an IPL (bootstrap) program that copied cards to the printer, running in supervisor mode. It ran on a 360 virtual machine under the MTS time-sharing system. Before that, I wrote programs in assembly language for an IBM 7044, and I even was allowed to operate the 7044 on some graveyard shifts. I also wrote programs that ran on a CDC 3600, a Univac 1108, and a Honeywell 200.

But I liked the PDP-8 best.

So there!


I was there as well. I punched the cards and read the core dumps and programmed in machine language using the front panel switches and lights. I programmed the Burroughs machine in Algol, and the IBM in assembly language (BALR, USING); the GCOS operating system which gave the GCOS field in the Unix/Linux /etc/passwd file its purpose and name; and the Univac 494 with the FASTRAND II drums. It was the most fearsome computing equipment I've ever encountered thanks to its spinning tonnage.

You are seen.


Respect




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