[kwlug-disc] what the rest of us were doing..

[Steve Izma]

On Fri, Aug 05, 2022 at 03:53:00PM -0400, Jon Thiele wrote:
> Subject: Re: [kwlug-disc] what the rest of us were doing..
> 
> First it was Honeywell Level 6 ===> System/370 ===> System/36
> ===>  AS/400 ===> z/OS or whatever it's called now...

I can't remember much about the mainframes I used other than when
I used them -- first of all at a one-day event in the Physics
building at U of W when I was in high school (probably 1966),
then during my second stint at U of W in 1982 (Integrated
Studies) when I did a programming class in WatFor, and used a
terminal at I.S. for various things, especially News, early
email, and typesetting (troff). After that, almost all my work
was on small Unix systems or PCs until Linux came out.

However, here's an interesting and amusing set of memoirs and
interviews about the development of supercomputers from the
point of view of techies at Lawrence Livermore Labs:
<https://www.computer-history.info/index.html>.

George Michael, who put this material together in the years
before he died in 2008, was a much older cousin of mine (he was
born in 1926, twenty-three years before me) who got hired at Labs
as a physicist in 1953. As people probably now, the main
occupation of the Labs was the development of nuclear weapons. I
didn't really get to know George until 1972, when we immediately
got into a serious (but actually good-natured) debate on the Viet
Nam War.

In early 1985 I went to the Usenix conference in Dallas and found
myself sitting at one point next to a guy with Lawrence Livermore
Labs on his badge. I said to him, "I've got a cousin who works
there." "Oh, what's his name?" "George Michael." "That's my
boss."

I went to visit George in late 1988, at a time when I figured I
knew the specs for the best kind of computer we all wanted to
work on. By that time, nearing retirement, George had been in the
forefront of specifying the specs for mainframe purchases at the
Labs for many years. I couldn't believe what they had at the
time, e.g., as much RAM storage as we could afford in hard disks.

Anyway, George's stories at the above link not only shine a light
on the conflicting views of computer development within the U.S.
military, but also how those policies affected commercial
computer development.

	-- Steve

-- 
Steve Izma
-
Home: 35 Locust St., Kitchener, Ontario, Canada  N2H 1W6
E-mail: sizma at golden.net  phone: 519-745-1313
cell (text only; not frequently checked): 519-998-2684

==
The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best – and
therefore never scrutinize or question.
    -- Stephen Jay Gould, *Full House: The Spread of Excellence
       from Plato to Darwin*, 1996