Weeks with a BBC Micro? Good enough to fix a mainframe, apparently Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's Friday column that tells your stories of tech support jobs performed under stress, duress, and all sorts of mess. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Walter," a mechanical engineer who took us back to the 1980s, just a few weeks after he had treated himself to a BBC …
Reminds me of a tour I once gave a group of international students in our HPC centre. One of the main machine was a Cray J932, which was quite an impressive box, with a huge rectangular green power LED and below it, well recessed, a reboot or power button (I forget which). One of the students asked what would happen if he pressed that button, whereupon I stated that a little metal claw would come out and snip the offending finger off. I added that if it didn't, I would get a pair of pliers and do it myself
At a previous employment* a 'bright chappie' in 'management' was tasked with reducing the company's energy usage. Among his 'bright ideas' was to reduce the voltage supplied to data centres by the UK's National Grid. So equipment was installed between the mains and the computers to reduce the energy consumption. (Senior and expert System Administration people will already suspect what comes next.). It seems that modern mainframes are sensitive to mains power and monitor it, and in the event that they detect a possible failure of said mains supply, will power down gracefully rather than await a sudden 'blackout', such as happened in the early hours of today to Heathrow Airport. So that is what they did. Oh, these were not just any mainframes you understand, no, they were 99.999% 24x7x365 availability servers for seriously important clients . . . (with little to no 'sense of humour').
Cue my colleague's despairing comment "If they had only talked to the people running the datacenter in the first place this would never have happened."***
* Currently 'happily'** retired.
** Well more happily than I was when 'working'. (think I'll leave it at that for now).
*** He would say that about once a month (mutatis mutandis) in my hearing as news of the latest easily foreseeable and avoidable disaster was communicated to him. (Ahh, happy days.)
reduce the voltage supplied
Nowadays marketed as "Voltage Optimisation". It relies on equipment being supplied with lower voltage actually using less power, and works ok for incandescent light bulbs (they get dimmer), "iron" balast fluorescent tubes and certain types of electrical motor. Maybe the original run of BBC Micros which used linear power supplies - less power lost to heat in the regulators, assuming there is still enough voltage that the regulator can operate correctly.
It does not work for thermostatically-controlled heaters (e.g. kettles, ovens, toasters) because they use less instantaneous power but make up for that by operating for longer (the kettle still has to boil, the toast still has to brown; it just takes longer to get there*).
But the key thing is that it makes absolutely no difference at all for anything running a switch-mode power supply, i.e. practically everything these days from a humble LED-based desk lamp, through the beefiest of servers, to the huge motors which run the cranes.
We had a company try to sell us such a system some years ago - when we still had some fluorescent lighting and some non-interter drive motors. They claimed 15 - 20% savings were possible (IIRC) with a minimum guarantee of 7%. I said that was impossible and pointed out why. They did some calculations and decided they couldn't guarantee 7% after all.
Expensive kit, disruptive to install. Much cheaper and more cost effective just to replace lights, motors etc. as they age. In some circumstances also cheaper and more cost effective to replace kit early. For example, when I started here, customer-facing computers were Pentiums with SCSI HDDs and took something like 80W from the wall even when "idling". Replacement machines were Core2, then AMD A8, and the idle consumption quickly came down to under 20W IIRC (haven't measured it for a while). Being switch-mode supplied, of course, VO wouldn't have made a jot of difference anyway.
M.
*in fact there is probably a (very) small but (likely) measurable increase in energy use for a lower power kettle as the things are not often well insulated and there will be more (time for) heat loss as it warms up.
Didn't the EU, during their "cut energy usage by domestic appliances" phase suggest limiting the maximum power of kettles, as they'd done for vacuum cleaners, etc? I think someone explained it to them in words of one syllable!
They did have a point as at the time there seemed to be a lot of cheap, poorly designed equipment sold on the basis of having a big (but probably inefficient) motor.
I have a vacuum cleaner (US) that proudly claims the amperage in big numbers on the front. Not that it's particularly efficient, but it sure does use those amps. Some of them are used in heating the cord's wall plug during use. It's lasted a good 20 years though.
the "US" plug shouldn't heat-up much.
They do, and it's not a problem. When you're pulling 10, 15, or 18 amps for half an hour at a time, even in the best case the plug and cord will become notably warm. Commonly seen with vacuum cleaners, space heaters, etc.
it likes to go into runaway, and burn.
We're not talking about arcs due to worn-out plugs, or going way over the rated current... Just operating *close* to the rated current for an extended period of time.
You'd be surprised. What is easy in the UK is way harder with the weedy US mains voltage. I have a high-velocity blower that allegedly[*] takes 10A (and is designed to be a bit inefficient as the airflow runs over the motor and so comes out slightly heated for fur-drying purposes). The plug and cord on that get a bit warm when I use it for long enough. It would be pulling half the current and a quarter of the heating effect if it was a 230V device.
[*] I think it takes more than that, based on the size of generator needed to power it reliably.
Yep, common with EV chargers that plug into a 13A socket. They are restricted to 10A but as they run for many hours at a time the fuse holder eventually gets a bit melty and the live prong starts to look distinctly second hand. I replaced the plug on mine with a commando plug. Its wired directly to a 16A breaker which has a very similar tripping characteristic to a 13A plug top fuse so equally well protected.
I used to believe that until I came across this EEVBlog article where he tested fuses. Summary - they are the safety feature of last resort to blow first if there is a short circuit but don't rely on them for much else.
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/blog/eevblog-1377-the-amazing-unpredictability-of-fuses/
Exactly. Because a UK double socket is usually rated at delivering 16A and the ring it is on is often 32A. So the 13A max cable/device needs protection. These days though the MCB at the consumer unit will flip long before the fuse in a plug goes if there is a short to neutral. Or the RCD will trip if there is an earth leak. Or the RCBO if you are using them, as is sensible, these days. Which reminds me of a small gripe, earth being called earth where its actually better described as a neutral reference. It is the same wire into most houses these days......
A mutli tiered or onion approach to safety which some other countries are less enthused by....
At work I'm not seeing the video.
My practical experience of fuses where I fully understood what was going on, was where I'd made an British extension cord rated 5 amps for some reason, with a 5 amps fuse.
Then for some necessity, I used it with an electric fan heater. Rated 3 kW, but I set it to 1 kW, and that worked.
Till someone had the bright idea to turn the heater onto 3 kW. The 5 amps fuse died while I was telling them "no, don't do that".
The other thing was home lamps with an incandescent bulb, 60W or 100W, and a 3 amps fuse because that was the smallest rating of household fuse. But somehow, quite frequently, a bulb would fail, and the fuse would go with it. I'd like to know why; my best guess was that the tungsten wire in the bulb snapped, and twanged around, and made something like a short-circuit. Anyway, I got used to replacing fuses as well as bulbs.
5A at 240V (assuming your heater was rated for 240V rather than 230V) is about 1.2kW, so setting the heater to 1kW should have been fine, particularly if your mains was actually nearer 230V.
As for lamps, generally, "normal" ("GLS") bulbs were supposed to have a section of the wire internally as a very low-current fuse - check for an extended section of glass covering one of the legs. I always understood that when the coil breaks an arc will form across the ends and this arc can migrate down the feed wires, bypassing what remains of the coil and becoming, effectively, a short circuit. This fuse section will blow to stop all the lights going off when one does.
I don't think I remember ever having a standard GLS bulb blow a plug or a circuit fuse/MCB, but plenty of "special" lamps did. Those ones called "candle" lamps seemed to be particularly bad, and more so if they were a cheap brand. Possibly they didn't have the built-in fuse section for reasons of space. Modern CFL / LED lamps are a mixed bag. Some have onboard fuses, others just seem to burn up a section of the power supply circuit board!
Although 3A (720W), 5A (1,200W) and 13A (3,100W) (all at 240V) were the normal and readily-available sizes of 1" plug fuse and (I believe) were/are the only ones in the BS and therefore BS- and kite-marked, it's not too difficult to find other values in the same format. I've made use of 1A and 10A fuses in the past for various reasons. If you take a 1" fuse apart before it has blown, the thickness of the wire goes a long way to explaining how BS1363 plugs get hot when operating near their rated load. The rest of the plug is chunky enough not to notice 3kW if all connections are properly tightened, but the fuse does get quite warm. I've seen some very cheap (and probably shouldn't have been BS/CE/UKCA/Kite-marked) moulded (i.e. not rewireable) plugs with melted fuse carriers because an inappropriate plastic had been used for the heat generated.
M.
"It would be pulling half the current and a quarter of the heating effect if it was a 230V device."
Ah yes, I remember that from my student days. Living in student halls, the 15w lamp in the microwave oven blew. Rather than actually buy a replacement we noticed that the emergency lighting in the corridors had 15w lamps with the same fitting, so we pinched one (what can I say, we were students and didn't know any better). When we put it in the oven, it was extremely bright, then we checked and noticed it was 15w/110v. So when presented with good old UK 230v, it was more like 60w. We kept it, and used the microwave oven as soft lighting by just opening the door.
Dyson pointed out that his vacuums were less power hungry because the turbine action didn't lose power where conventional machines clog up and need more powerful motors to overcome the loss of suction.
I love the 'energy saving' supplements that still warn of leaving TVs on standby and suggest using a smart plug to switch off... ignoring the fact that the standby power has been mandated <0.5w for years and that smart plugs need to draw power to function
Much simpler: They tested. Result was: A vacuum cleaner which takes 2000 W isn't double as good as one with 1000 W. You might save 1 minute on a 10 Minute stretch, but still takes double kWh. Within those tests something else was proved, which up to then was only suspected: You can make 900 W vacuum cleaners which suck with the same strength as a 2000 W one, just with a better construction. And that is the base the limit was decided on.
Only special vacuum cleaners have an exception, for example those which use water as filter like Kärcher an Hyla. Using water as filter has a very big advantage: The air leaving them is so much cleaner. They are used in environments where allergenic are a problem for people or patients. I personally switched to a Kärcher DS 5600 since I was fed up that every vacuum cleaner getting smelly and there is nothing you can do about it. The Kärcher always emits neutral smell, i.e. no smell, not once since I bought it seven years ago. But it is loud.
And regarding Dyson: You can by them here, no problem, WTH is this talk about Dyson left Europe? They even advertise on TV... And youtube, in German language.
>WTH is this talk about Dyson left Europe?
They moved their HQ to Singapore and manufacturing to SE Asia. This was purely as a protest against the evil overbearing Eu bureaucrats and in no-way a tax scheme or a search for cheap labour
No, actually they are going back in History :D. Rheinmetall has some interest in currently underused/unused VW production lines. And if you know what Rheinmetall is planning to built and what VW built about 90 years ago you might see the match in the venn-diagram. Hearing "Going Back In Time" in my mind from a movie 40 years old...
You could call the devices to be built "cleaner" too, but the technique is not vacuum. Oh, and it might remind you of and old MAD magazine joke from over 30 years ago. Funny time we live in!
No, it was that the bagged cleaners were tested with a new clean bag and the authorised testing terminated before they had lost too much suction because the bag was clogged, so the average suction was artificially higher.
Dyson's bagless design started off lower but chugged along all day with little dropoff, so scored a lower 'average' despite being consistent
I have an old bagged vacuum cleaner in the garage that retains insane levels of suction even when the bag is jammed full of crap - spiders the size of mice get sucked out of wall crevices by it along with small rocks. Indoors I made the mistake of buying a bagless one [not Dyson]. It was great first use, but since then, no matter how much it is emptied or cleaned, its is absolutely feeble. My next indoor cleaner will be a cheap bagged one.
And yet one of Dyson's reasons for promoting leaving the EU was the limitations on vacuum cleaner motor power.
I always found it amusing that he moaned and moaned about the power draw of mains cleaners being limited...
...and then he started touting battery-powered cleaners as being "better" at cleaning than the mains models. I've yet to see a battery cleaner running at anywhere near 1kW.
M.
Didn't the EU, during their "cut energy usage by domestic appliances" phase suggest limiting the maximum power of kettles
NO
Limiting power for a vacuum cleaner is a relatively simple metric to apply - and force manufacturers to do some work optimising effectiveness vs power consumption instead of relying on brute force ("if it doesn't suck well enough, just bung a bigger motor in it" mentality).
With kettles (and I actually trotted off (virtually) to the relevant EU site and found that), no they were not planning to limit power for a kettle. They were looking at those less tangible and easy to dictate aspects: minimum fill level (e.g. not having to put two cups in if you only want to make one cup of tea), easy to see and understand indicators for fill level (i.e. having made it possible to just boil one cup, you can actually see that that's what you have in it), reducing heat losses (so when standing, it keeps the water hotter for longer, so takes less energy to reboil it a couple of minutes later), and things like that.
Indeed, the power actually consumed by SNP devices remains constant, but the current increases.
Losses in the wiring then increase with the square of the current.
The additional resistance and magnetic losses in the extra transformer are also significant. So they always increase energy consumption.
What they used to achieve was increased lifetime of a tungsten lamp, as 5% voltage drop could often extend lifetime by 20-50%.
Now they tend to have the opposite effect, due to the aforementioned heating.
Back in the late 80s were doing non destructive testing of power stations and used a BBC Micro to control the equipment and log results. They told us we could expect anything from 150V to 280V on site, so we got hold of a VariAC the size of a beer barrel and connect an unsuspecting Beeb to it. We managed to turn it right down to just a shade over 100V before it's linear power supply gave up, which was impressive as it wasn't a 110V/240V unit. The hairier test was to see how high it could go, I tentatively raised it to 280V and it seemed fine, nothing getting too hot. I would have been happy to leave it there, but the boss insisted we go to 300V, and after making sure I wasn't going to get blamed for frying it, we turned it up, and it was fine running for over 10 minutes - hardy stuff those old Micros!
The worst part: The servers, if they stay up, don't use less power. If 5% less than the usual voltage is supplied the PSU simply takes more current, i.e. higher amps.
But if you push more amps across the same wires in the wall to compensate loss of volt you have higher losses. So in the end that was a double fail!
One more thing, though that is not so easy to prove quickly: Depending on how the PSU was made, supplying less voltage than designed as "optimum", will cause it to operate in a less efficient window, using even more, so it come to a triple fail!
If only they knew the basics of electricity.
@jou: Bravo. Came here to say just that/those.
Switching PSU efficiency does change over input voltage range and, even today, has a 'sweet spot' of maximum efficiency at a particular voltage - wide input voltage tolerant PSUs are not equally efficient over their full input voltage range and are a convenience.
These days, not much computer-related kit powered by the 'mains' is a 'truly resistive' load (For example, an old-fashioned tungsten filament lamp), but a more 'reactive' load and probably a 'constant power' load.
Reducing the voltage supplied to a resistive load does indeed reduce the power consumed, but doing that to a modern 'constant power' load means that the input current will increase. The higher the current, the greater the losses in the wiring and/or connections/joints. Sadly, there's no way round that, until someone re-invents the science behind 'W=VI' or W=I2R.
Jou's already said this, and I've just wasted my time - and some of yours! Sorry :-)
> If only they knew the basics of electricity.
My house has long wires. The voltage sags from 125V to 108V. When I flush the toilet the lights dim. (The well-pump takes a 40A starting surge.)
As I moved from incandescents to CFLs to LEDs the dimming lessened. Cheap CFLs never had perfect regulation.
When the LED Revolution came, I was reviewing consumer products including lightbulbs. I liked to throw them on a Variac and spin the dial, see how they handled it. Most LEDs, even pretty cheap ones, had "no" change of brightness from 150V down to 80V. Once I hooked the What-A-Watt and confirmed that current went up as voltage went down, doh.
I've also burned-up motors. Given a constant load (a fan is semi-constant; an eager carpenter making laths can hold a rip-saw at 0.45 horsepower), if the voltage drops the current rises. (This gets very obvious on long extension cords.) The high current tends to trip-out thermal cutoffs. If they stick, the motor goes up in stinky smoke.
> When I flush the toilet the lights dim
YMMD! How many curics? Seriously though: How old is your house? And how thin are those wires? Or is it the grid and/or transformer in front of your house which fail?
> how thin are those wires?
#2 Aluminum. Thin 1/4 inch. 500' long. The property was probably wired for a temporary trailer, and the house just happened without re-thinking. I did spend considerable time checking splices and replacing messes, but the wiring is fine. I have acquired a 220V pump but it is not worth lifting the old pump as long as the PC doesn't re-boot from toilet action. (Only one desktop left, all else is laptops.)
"Among his 'bright ideas' was to reduce the voltage supplied to data centres by the UK's National Grid. So equipment was installed between the mains and the computers to reduce the energy consumption."
For a moment, I thought you were going to say that the losses in the energy reducing equipment were more than that saved by installing them.
In the late 1900s I worked at a multinational facilities management company that ran customers' IBM mainframe workloads. They ran a lot of customer systems as guests of the IBM VM hypervisor. My team handled software integration for the VM/370 OS, and we had our own hardware, separate from production systems, which in addition to our own VM/370 work guests, also hosted a couple of OS/370 guests for the OS/390 software integration team.
OS/370 was not quite as stable as VM/370 (TBH, its workload was more complicated than that of the hypervisor's) and once or twice a month something would hang up and one would become non-responsive. When this happened, the operators became accustomed to restarting the hypervisor instead of just the crippled guest (because VM's shutdown/restart procedure was less complicated). This of course restarted all of the guest machines, not just the broken one. We complained to Operations about this for quite a while but to no avail.
Eventually IBM integrated network capability into the software management software of the VM OS. Up until that point, VM hypervisors in other sites maintained their own copies of the VM software repository that we built, and it was always a struggle to keep them in sync with ours, but with the availability of remote access we changed our upgrade process so that remote sites could upgrade their software remotely from our GA (Generally Available) repository. A year or so later, while a systems administrator at a remote site was upgrading its software, one of the OS/370 systems on our hypervisor hung, and the operators bounced the VM hypervisor.
There was a lot of harsh words, gesticulating and red faces, but when the smoke had cleared the operators finally understood the difference between restarting a guest OS and restarting the VM hypervisor. :-)
Very nearly 40 years ago, in my first role as a Civil Servant, we'd just got our first DEC LN03 laser printer and, for a project I was working on, I had the department's only DEC Rainbow so I had access to rudimentary word processing.
Great, I could type my own letters, formatted as I wanted them, print them out then, thanks to the rules of the time, send them to the typing pool to be retyped on their IBM golfballs! Invariably there'd be one or two mistakes when they came back but that was considered acceptable at the time.
We were in a similar situation in the biology dept of a forensic lab. One of the aspects of our statements of evidence was that there was separate stationery for single sheet statement and further statements for first, continuation and final pages of multi-page reports. Easy enough to cope with now when the whole thing could be printed on blank paper but back in the day with a single tray printer and simple text editors it was better to leave it to the typists who, apart from anything else, had a better sense of which to take.
The late Sir Terry Pratchett tells a similar tale in his book of essays 'A blink of the screen'*.
As a former newspaper reporter he was skilled in touch typing. So when he became press officer for the nuclear energy generating folks in the UK, and had to do a Press Release, he would type it up. But this was not allowed as it had to be typed up by the typing pool, which usually meant a 'turnaround' of over a day. This is, of course, not a problem when there is a suspected radioactive leak and the press pack are baying for information, because, clearly it is not important or urgent to get a formal statement out, or is it?
* Excellent book, particularly his experiences doing book signing tours. He changed publishers once because they 'organised' such a tour in Australia, but did not provide any books. ISBN 978-0-385-61898-4, published by Doubleday.
Oh my god, that was a difficult read.
A) I'm a huge fan of Sir Pratchett, so reading about his decline was something where I simply had to periodically just stop reading for a week.
B) I'm terrified of dementia. My mother's worst horror was cancer, and I'm the same with dementia. I have my dementia pistol locked in the safe. So even more difficult to read.
C) It's obvious Mr. Wilkins was a huge fan of Sir Pratchett even before being his assistant, so the experience was really hard on him as well. How he managed to relive that experience and write the book with such a level attitude, I don't know, but he did a good job.
Sir Terry certainly did what all the great artists and artistes do - he left us wanting more.
I did write to him, once, and got a reply (telling me off, actually). One of my most treasured possessions (along with the postcards from Alan Bennett and the signed photograph of Barnes Wallis).*
*Yep, I'm showing off here, don't often get the chance. Bennett does reply to fan mail, usually with a postcard depicting some part of Yorkshire. Sir Barnes Wallis is long gone now.
> Excellent book, particularly his experiences doing book signing tours. He changed publishers once because they 'organised' such a tour in Australia, but did not provide any books
A friend of mine is another fantasy writer, Robert Rankin. I introduced him to his wife, who is an ex-girlfriend of mine. :-)
A publisher got him to do a signing tour in New Zealand. Bit of a hike from Brighton. When he got to the first bookshop, nicely early, he found they didn't have a single one of his books in stock.
They were expecting _Ian_ Rankin instead... A different author of very different novels.
He told me he didn't mind too much as they got a free week or so in NZ out of it.
this was not allowed as it had to be typed up by the typing pool,
When I joined BT as a software engineer in 1981 our terminals + modems linked to a remote mainframe were in a separate "terminal room". When we got our first local VAX for regular use we put VT100s on our desks, which was far more convenient.
The union kicked up such a stink - only typists were allowed keyboards on their desks, they declared, we couldn't have engineers doing the own typing, it might put the typing pool staff out of work! They really didn't understand computers... Might explain why hardly any of the new graduate recruits joined the union.
On similar note, remember the pay increases demanded by the unions whenever "new technology" was introduced? Well, it's new and better skills innit. Have to pay more for that. Still goes on today too. Sometimes, with some real justification, mostly not though. We still have unions demanding that trains have "guards" and whatnot because "jobs", even when the job itself is redundant and someone id being paid to essentially do nothing. So they "adjust" the job to give them something to do, and now the union demands more pay for said redundant job because "new and/or more responsibility". As I said above, sometimes with justification, but mostly just Luddite attitudes.
> We still have unions demanding that trains have "guards" and whatnot because "jobs", even when the job itself is redundant
I don't know which country you are from: But if you don't want your certified and trained train personnel, send them to Germany! We have a shortage here... That includes the "guards" you speak about, which is not an invented job here. Computer would have taken many of those jobs long ago, but computers are too dumb to react on unforseen situations.
Given automation and virtual control, I'd suggest that some trains today, and perhaps more in future, need guards more than they need drivers. You can drive a train electronically or remotely. Guards deal with passengers, and computers/AI chat bots are bollocks at that.
While it's not a "real" railway, DLR was designed from the start to be driverless. One person crew, who's just there to keep an eye on things and people - and if needed, to take over and drive manually. I was once on one when we were asked to move from the front row seats so the attendant could drive.
On some of our trains now, the person most people call a "guard" is officially called the "train manager". Apart from opening and closing the doors, checking tickets occasionally, they also have controls for the heating/cooling, lighting, and of course, the microphone for announcing whatever the current excuse* for being late is.
* Though to be fair, a sinkhole opening up under the tracks is (IMO) an acceptable excuse, to give one real example.
Sometimes typo tolerance is high. My prior employer was an R&D firm that basically delivered reports to research groups in the US military, which were staffed and led by doctorates. My annual reviews included goals like "number of typos per report" because the customers were smart, educated, and were of the opinion they were paying fortunes for pieces of paper.
On the other hand, my current employer recently issued a company history book (to the effect of "100 years of engineering successes") and the introduction page was littered with typos. Most of my engineering reports are email summaries where no one cares about typos. Instead, they just want the factory's problem to get fixed as fast as possible.
I remember the steno- & dicto-typists moving from IBM golf balls to PCs pretty much effortlessly. The speed they could type was phenomenal. The software (WordStar later WordPerfect) didn't faze them at all. Flakey floppy disks 8"&5¼" and printers especially those lacking A4 support were the two that gave them most grief.
"Promotion" from the shop floor was usual back then when computers were first introduced. I recall a young bloke just started working as an apprentice storeman when the company installed a minicomputer based warehousing system and called from the corps of storeman for volunteers to be trained to look after the system. Needless to say the lad was the only taker and for his sins a long career in IT followed.
I remember the chaos when Windows first reached those same typists and they had to move away from the DOS-based Word Perfect. Without exception they all hit the keyboard buffer limit when they started typing and it was such an impediment they were all allowed to go back to DOS systems.
Windows - downgrading performance since Day 1
I suggested to many companies that they should not 'upgrade' from DOS-Word Perfect to early Windows. But, it was the new "Kool Aid" and many moved over.
It was when I first started using the phrase "This was identified early on in your project as a likely outcome."
As "I told you f**king so!" is not so politically acceptable.
That takes me back - the days when Windows wasn't an OS, most of your software was still in DOS, and a smattering required you to type win.
I was using WordPerfect, Lotus Freelance and Supercalc mainly in DOS - can't for the life of me remember what I used Windows for originally. Eventually Aldus Pagemaker.
Off on a tangent, you had to make up presentations in Freelance, then render them to see what they looked like. I'd then send them off to get printed on slides for my boss to give a presentation.
My wife tested at 100wpm on a Selectric. We figured she was self-limiting because a Selectric will fail its rollover limit at about 110wpm and she would occasionally get the symptom of that: hyphens. Later, when what she had a work was a Mac, she called Apple support to ask if there were keyboard shortcuts for *everything*. The rather puzzled support person said there weren't and why would she want them. Couldn't she just use the mouse? She somewhat testily pointed out at, if she took her hand off the keyboard to use the mouse, it slowed down her typing. (She also used to type up manuscripts on a unix--BSD 2.9--system inserting nroff -ms commands on the fly at full speed.)
The mouse is one of several reasons why, since retiring from my work with IBM mainframes, I hate the text editors available on every other OS I have worked with. Almost every time I want to do something besides enter text I have to take my hand off the keyboard, fiddle with the mouse, then try to find the right position on the keyboard once more. Other annoyances are the "command" system and its lack of a command line with real commands (not just Alt- and Ctrl-Letter combinations), and the lack of macro capability (keypress record/playback is not macro capability). The closest available text editor to the best (IMO) IBM mainframe text editor (z/VM CMS Xedit) is The Hessling Editor, but its command syntax and Regina macro language are enough different to make it hard for me to use. These days I'm using jEdit, which still has the impediment of mousing, but at least has macro capability via beanShell and NetRexx.
There's a reason experienced typists handled early versions of wordstar and wordperfect so seamlessly.. The workflow was set up to mimic that of a typewriter. You'd set up all your document formatting before you started typing. with the settings all named the same as typists were familiar with. This design choice was why many typists stuck with wordperfect even when wordfperect was behind the curve and very late to the WYSIWYG party. Even after WP ended up with WYSIWYG (in version 4, I think it was?) you could still use that same workflow with the same keyboard shortcuts to access it while Word made this "typist's workflow" not impossible but harder to access.
True WYSIWYG was introduced in WordPerfect 6 when they gave the option of a full graphical screen in their MSDOS version (which IIRC was a bit slow) as well as the traditional blue text screen.
I think it was WordPerfect 5 or 5.1 that introduced a graphical print preview, although editing was purely text screen.
I was a manager before the days of email. (You could write a document, print it, circulate it, and get handwritten comments back).
I shared a secretary Pauline, who was brilliant, first thing she would come in with my mail. I would read it, and dictate the response (she would make it polite and grammatical). It took half an hour.
By lunchtime she was back with all my letters - I would read and sign. She used to have a job as secretary to a senior manager. She often went with the manager in the car to the airport, taking dictation,
and have the letters ready when he got back later that day.
She also did all the filing (of non P&C) stuff.
We then got corporate email - and most of the secretaries were let go.
It then took me all morning to do the emails - write the replies- rewrite the replies etc.
Looking at the overall cost the company saved the cost of some low paid people - and had expensive people doing low paid work- so overall the costs went up.
And then the realisation dawned concerning who actually ran the place, as opposed to who thought they did?
The mantra is true for both academia and industry - get on the good side of the secretaries (assistants nowadays), storesmen, technicians, security and cleaning staff and you can get anything done anywhere.
We also had the same situation at work a while back, where some bright spark mandated that everyone now had to use Concur and arrange their own travel when on business trips.
All to save on the salaries of maybe 3-4 part time ladies who used to handle everything with efficient grace at a rapid speed.
Cue everyone from the engineers up to vice presidents trying to tame Concur, getting frustrated and angry and of course taking 3-4 times longer than aforesaid part timers did it.
And that's not to mention the hourly rate difference involved, compounded by the extended period of time wasted in the DIY effort...
Generally, I agree with the contents of these comments thus far.....which seem to say things were easier for pre-email written communications when you had skilled help.
However....delegation and trust doesn't always work. Many moons ago, I worked for a firm with a dedicated travel office. It was their job to sort out the tickets, visas, medicals etc. one required for whatever one was doing overseas. The "Dickmon"(The department boss if anyone remembers this!), Scott, Graham and I had to go to Israel for a few of days for a tech/engineering review following an acquisition that led to the "SDTA".
The work was in Tel Aviv, but the accommodation they booked was in Jerusalem (About one hour away by road, for a total of 2Hrs/Day). The only reason we had a decent trip was that we caught this before we left and had them re-book us into a hotel in Tel Aviv itself. You can't trust anyone[1]!
Our bar of choice in those days was the "MASH Pub" ('More Alcohol Served Here').....looks as if it's a gay bar now. This bar was the first place I told the boss to f**k off, and meant it. Why? He and others wanted to catch a taxi home, I wanted to walk. I walked, involving an 02:00hrs 'paddle' in the Med. and a bollocking from the Russian hotel night staff for dripping seawater over their nice clean hotel. Gorgeous evening!
[1] Self included. Same boss was visiting a different site in Genoa, Italy after myself and Neil had been there. He asked us how to get from the hotel to 'Work', and we gave him detailed directions (Turn left/right, go 100M etc). When he arrived in Italy a couple of days later, our parentage was questioned via cellphone after he found himself at a 100ft high precipice thanks to the unfinished roads Neil and I had spotted on the route between Christopher Columbus Airport and the facility at Sestri Ponente. He never did get even with us for that one!
I have recollection of exactly this situation ... but in reverse.
In the early 2000s shortly after the IT affairs of a large Anglo-Swedish Pharmaceutical company were outsourced to a large US-based IT company, a friend of mine - and at the time my team leader - who had worked for the US-company for many years and who had become used to arranging his own travel was struggling (I think it was taking a couple of days, and a significant part of his daily effort as quite Senior IT Architect) with setting up a trip to the US (I think to visit some of the Pharma sites as well as a conference or something). One of the secretarial staff who'd come over as part of the outsource spotted his struggles and, taking pity on him, offered a hand (as she would have done the travel arrangements for any of us, pre-outsource) ... all sorted by lunch-time. The shock and surprise on his face over how much better this could be was amazing. But of course ... over the next two years virtually all the secetarial team were let go at the end of their contracts, and the few remaining were moved to work exclusively for "Executives"(*) or became the victims of Resource Actions.
(*) Can anybody explain how the term "Vice-President" (VP) - I believe meaning "one who acts in place of the President" - became such a low-level position, when the only "President" of that company held the triple title of "Chairman, Chief Executive and President"? It always seemed to be that VPs were two-a-penny and almost the lowest form of life on the Executive ladder (somewhere below frog-spawn).
> Can anybody explain how the term "Vice-President" (VP) - I believe meaning "one who acts in place of the President" - became such a low-level position
In regulated (US) companies - banks - the title of VP comes with becoming an "officer" of the company and places more onerous legal controls on you. At least that's how it was explained to me at one of those banks. Then of course in smaller companies the apparent prestige of the title has been carried through as another zero-cost promotion.
This is an issue that just won't go away. It's particularly an issue in public service.Whenever a government want to show they're controling costs they target the "non-essential" not front line staff, administrates etc.mostly on lower pay scales Great, so then you have your doctors, teachers,speech therapists etc. two finger typing reports and distributing them, chasing up appointments and so on and so forth, when they should be diagnosing, lesson planning, etc.
Anon for what should be obvious reasons ...
In the dim and dark past, we had departmental secretaries who had the task of filing all our correspondence, documents, etc - complete with indexes etc. If you needed something, it would be filed, and could (usually) be found - even if it had been sent to the archives to free up some filing cabinet space in the office.
Roll forward, and we don't have those. So who carefully files all those digital artifacts we have to keep, for projects that will be in service for "many" decades ? Of course, all us engineers in defence are masters of the IT (mostly MS bloatware), and the vagaries of Sharepoint; and of course, everyone takes the time to correctly set all the metadata when throwing a file into a big skip of files. So in "a few years" when there's a request for some information, of course it will be trivial to find it by just applying a filter with the right metadata to the gazzillion files in the repo. And in the unlikely event of actually finding the right file, of course it will still be readable by the then current software.
Not to mention, it seems that the IT gets a major refresh every so often, where everything has to be migrated from the old to the new (if you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you) before the old system is switched off. IMO it's only a matter of time before something happens, people ask how/why a decision was made, and nobody has a clue - but perhaps that could be a good thing.
> Needless to say the lad was the only taker and for his sins a long career in IT followed.
I worked with a few such people myself. One poor lad became the IT contact because he was the only one who knew how to reset the margins in WinWord. Clearly that made him the staff expert.
I was asked to go and investigate a control issue at a modern utility, installed in the middle of nowhere. Our mechanical-installation guys were still on site but the customer had insisted on 'Someone from the Office' to resolve the problem. It was clearly an issue of different sensor-inputs not being compatible with the control philosophy and I went with some trepidation as it was a complex arrangement to isolate and fix the fault whilst keeping the machinery operating.
On arrival at site, I had a cup of tea with our site guys and outlined the problem as I understood it. Two of us went over to the operating room to review the equipment and before I knew it, Keith had opened up the control screen, tapped in a few instructions and said "I think that transducer has incorrect coefficients." I left site a few minutes later.
I made sure we employed Keith on a full-time basis. A few years later he left us and now runs his own business.
Nothing wrong with a well built Retro Encabulator but I'll take a good old Turbo Encabulator any day. Perhaps a bit more faff in keeping the girdle springs in check but far fewer problems with the dingle arms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac7G7xOG2Ag
It's always the bl00dy reciprocating dingle arm.
Or the Diagonal Steam Trap ?
Well done to Walter.
I know that you don't, in general, 'reboot' mainframes BUT you also should not 'ambush' someone with limited knowledge & skills.
The fact that he could access the mainframe and reboot it so easily points to the company having little knowledge themselves.
Sometimes the blind leading the blind works !!!
Hope that was 'Walters' first step to a career in IT.
:)
One hopes that he has been 'Regomised' for one or more 'Who, Me?' articles by now. Anyone who's initial approach to a 'broken' computer is tot ry turning it off and then on again should have some pretty corking* stories to tell.
*I've just finished reading P. G. Wodehouse's book 'Something Fresh' in which the Hon. Freddie Threepwood uses that word quote a lot.
My school was one of those lucky enough to get a full classroom of BBC Model B computers, each supplied with a Cub colour monitor, we also had a Ceefax decoder for downloading software from Ceefax!
The room next to ours was used by the secretarial class, the girls (Trump would love our school, only boys were allowed in the computer room, only girls in the typing room) in there were armed with IBM golfball typewriters.
Naturally, the spirit of competition soon emerged, and we set up races where the 30 boys tried to type a passage in Wordstar quicker than the girls could type it.
We lost, every single time.
The only thing we ever won was the noise level of our Alphacom golf ball printer, it was way, way louder than their typewriters...
I worked in a place with a high-speed dot-matrix printer (it had four heads to reduce the travel) on a stand with metal legs.
It used to print a very, very long sales report every month (that was never collected).
One month, there was a loud "BANG"! as it fell to the floor - the vibration caused by the carriage changing direction had caused metal fatigue in the legs!
The report was turned off after that, and no one noticed.
Back in the day at my dad's office we have Zenith H-89 and Zenith Z-100 systems running CP/M with probably 4mb of RAM. 8" or 5.25" floppies. I would do a bunch of data entry into MagicWand or PeachTree DB software (or just a flat file formatted properly, I forget which but suspect the flat file now...) and then write up the marketing letter, format it and let it all rip on a Diablo 630 daisy wheel printer. Many, was that thing loud. Made the whole office grimace when I kicked it off, so they soon got one of those stands with the hatch you could lift up to get it, but otherwise left down to muffle the noise. Came with the noise absorbing foam traingles as well to hopefully cut down the noise. Those were the days...
You've obviously never used an ICL 1900 lineprinter: these could print at 160 characters per line at up to 1300 lines per minute. The mechanism was based round a hollow drum the full width of the paper with 160 rings of characters, each containing the complete character set. These were organised so that each embossed row had the same character in every position. The embossed drum was installed behind a row of 160 hammers and a inky ribbon the full width of the paper: both paper and ribbon scrolled vertically, though not at the same speed. The print hammers were driven off a very latge capacitor in the printer's body.
The printer was loud enough when printing invoices, etc, but George 3's print driver could easily outdo it. It separated documents by outputting, IIRC, a page throw, a job title, 10 full width lines of 160 asterisks and another page throw: when this happened the printer almost jumped off the floor and made a noise similar to a short burst from a machine gun.
These ICL printers were much louder than any IBM lineprinter I've ever heard running. That's because IBM used train printers: the character set formed a rotating chain running across the paper path and were designed so that only one character could hit the paper at a time.
Pretty certain that IBM and other band/chain printers were aware of where all the characters were on the band, and could trigger more than one hammer at a time if characters on the band happened to be in the right location, and also had more than one set of the characters on the band. But you're right, printing the same character in every location on a line would not cause the triggering of all the hammers at once.
Band printers generally made a fast continuous chattering sound, except when the engineers ran their test patterns (often with the acoustic cover lifted), which made much more noise, probably deliberately, by printing worst case patterns during the test.
I remember the ultra expensive Printronix an accountant friend bought for tax season in the mid '80s. He realized his bottleneck during tax season was the rate at which he could crank out printed forms for his clients, so it did pay for itself.
It had maybe a dozen or two dozen print heads mounted in a carriage that spanned the entire printer. This carriage moved left and right about an inch either way and constantly bounced off rubber stops. It could print with the paper moving at a speed that on other printers would be a form feed.
I just saw some Printronix barcode printers at work, so I'm glad and amazed to see they're still in business.
Impact printers were getting fairly close to their practical limits in terms of printing speed. There was a flurry of development in the early 1970s to come up with better solutions. Xerox produced something that was kind of a hybrid between a drum printer and a photocopier - a set of flash lamps illuminated the correct characters on a drum transferring their images optically to the selenium copier drum. That got printing up to around 4000 lines a minute. Honeywell introduced an electrostatic system using a dielectric paper that raised speeds to 18,000 lines per minute.
However, it was IBM that developed the first laser printer - the IBM 3800. Its initial version managed only a shade under 14,000 lines per minute, but a later version raised the speed to over 20,000 lines per minute - around 2.8 km/h. With paper running that fast , a laser and a hot fuser unit, suddenly noise was not the only hazard. There's a fascinating training video for operators that shows the massive scale of the beast.
> Zenith H-89 and Zenith Z-100 systems running CP/M with probably 4mb of RAM
4 milli-bits of RAM? Well, that wouldn't quite manage DOS, so CP/M it would have to be.
Sorry, couldn't resist. But 4MB would have been a marvel to behold on a Z-100 (max 768KB) let alone the Heath H-89/Zenith Z-89 (max 64KB)! Remember drooling over the Heath version in the catalogue, never got my hands on one. Probably all to the best.
Maybe we're so used to 32GB or more that 4MB sems so very tiny, we forget how little RAM is - was - *actually* needed to get useful work done.
At his primary school my eldest son, now in his middle thirties, was in his classroom one day when the teacher announced that something had gone wrong and the school computer (a BBC Micro) couldn't print any more. My lad, about seven years old at the time, put up his hand and asked if he could have a look. Ever keen to encourage inquisitiveness the teacher agreed. He switched off the computer and printer, removed the printer lead, blew in both ends and switched everything back on. To the utter joy and amazement of his teacher it all worked.
We had a CPC6128 at home and even at that tender age he'd learnt that with faults like that it was usually the bit in between that was the problem.
I've never been more proud!
When I was a university student some 35 years ago the main university computing center had a big glassed in data center with an IBM mainframe, a half dozen minis, and various other stuff including two massive line printers. I don't know what rate they could print at but IIRC they seemed to produce a page every couple seconds at full tilt. They had this weird look when they were really going - sort of like what a sci fi movie will do to show something is "out of phase" with our reality.
The reason was that they sat on what I guess could be termed balance boards. I heard they'd been built by the university's engineering department, so they were not some sort of off the rack item I guess. Basically those printers generated a lot of vibration which the datacenter admin didn't want translating through the floor to that time's super sensitive hard drives so they were sitting on something that allowed the printer and the top of the little platforms it sat on to vibrate so the floor didn't. So as a result they looked slightly "fuzzy" to the eyes when they were going, because they were vibrating at some really high frequency. Fortunately the glass kept the noise down to a minimum, but I imagine on the other side they were stupendously loud. In grad school I had access to that room for a particular server owned by a student group, but the line printers were gone by then so I never had the "pleasure" of hearing them up close!
Reminds me of when the guy who built our in-house project management PERT system left and the boss was casting around for someone who could take over looking after it. I joking commented that I had recently seen an Open University programme on the BBC2 about PERT and BANG! I got landed with the job - accidentally dropping the huge stack of punch cards that defined a project was the least of my worries.
I was working at a company in Ipswich who had just got PCs (I was netwkring them). One secretary was using Wordstar but didn't really understand about files or anything. So, anything new, she tacked onto the top of the previous letters and then just printed the first 'x' pages to produce the document in question.
Of course, the file got humumgous and I had the task of explaining that she really needed to create new documents. Not sure it worked but we did have some nice evenings/nights out together
30 years ago someone elderly got a computer my wife and I were "technical support"
Chas used to have video tapes, and a book which had the contents "TAPE 1" .... TAPE 2..."
When he tried creating files ... he called the files FILE1.txt and had a book with "FILE1.txt" is the WI accounts, "File2.txt " is the list of contacts etc.
It was a big leap forward when he learned how to name the files which matched their content.
We gave my mother a laptop. She loved the fish tank screen saver. I came in one day to find her with a watering can, hovering over the laptop
"I haven't changed the water in the fish tank for a while,so I was going to top up the water -but cant find a hole"
Then, as now, a real mainframe like 360/370/30XX systems (we are talking the time that the BBC Micro was new), did not have s single power switch (unless you include the EPO in the machine room), and even if you did end up powering down the CPU complex, applying power probably wouldn't have brought it back up again!
Mainframes had quite convoluted start-up sequences which often included resetting the disk string controllers and the communication controllers, and then using some arcane incantations through the MOC in order to boot the system. They were normally curated by a dedicated team of operators as well.
IMHO, he was probably talking about a System/34, or System/36 departmental computer (not a mainframe, but regarded as a midrange system), which were quite often installed in an office environment and managed by non-specialist staff.
But the whole thing about word-processing on any IBM system prior to the Displaywriter and/or PC (and maybe the 6150) was the screen-at-a-time terminal interface (3270/5250) that IBM used to use for their midrange and mainframe data systems. This would have been enough to drive a typist migrating from a real typewriter absolutely crazy until they had got used to it!
When I joined IBM in 1989 along with quite a few other new start IBMers recruited from the industry, this style of terminal was still in common use, and the number of people who had been introduced to computers using VAXes, UNIX systems, other mini's, PCs and home computers who struggled with the screen at a time nature of 3270 type terminals and PROFS (the most common IBM mainframe office suite for s370 and later mainframes) was almost everyone around me.
I'm very glad I dodged that bullet and have had very little IBM experience my career, mostly AIX which is NOT Unix in any way, shape or form. Just from the application interface, not the management side.
Though I do have an AS/400 sitting in a corner which needs to be run every once in a while since no one can be arsed to get the data off this system and migrated to something simpler to use and maintain. This is what happens when you let go all your application support team... you end up with horrors like this. Or the 20+ year old Java Tomcat app they're trying to replace now. Sigh...
Hmm. Don't agree about AIX not being UNIX. It is, by certification, quite definitely a UNIX, and if you ignore all the IBMisms that have been added, you can treat it as a UNIX system without any difficulty.
If you look at what makes a UNIX UNIX, it is mainly the API and the userland command set. AIX has all of this, being POSIX 1003, UNIX 98, UNIX 03 and UNIX V7 certified (about the only system that has UNIX V7)
Under the covers, well what is UNIX anyway. AIX from version 3.1 has a kernel that is written mainly in C (AIX 1.X for the 6150 PC/RT supposedly had much of it's VRM and microkernel re-written in a PL/I subset, but AIX 3.1 for the RS/6000 was mostly a re-port of SVR2, with bits of BSD grafted on and IBM enhancements - I know, I saw quite a lot of the code when I did an AIX Internals course back in 1990).
Since that time, IBM has enhanced AIX quite considerably, although I have no idea how much of the current code base is written in languages other than C.
What you can say is that compared with, say, Solaris, which has retrofitted technology from other UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems (specifically parts of the GNU tool set) into the base operating system, AIX is quite archaic in feel. It does not offer many of the GNU "--" flags on commands (but much of this is available as non-warranted add-ons from IBM). But AIX DOES implement what the UNIX standards require, it's just that other UNIX and UNIX-like OSes moved on beyond the standards.
One think that people (like you) point to is the changes in the way that AIX is administered compared to other UNIXs. But the management of UNIX systems was never included in any standard, and from my 45+ years of using and managing various UNIX systems from Edition 6 through SVR4 to the later versions of Solaris, HP/UX and Digital UNIX (and AIX, of course), there is and never was a common way of system management across different vendors versions of UNIX. Sun, HP, DEC and all the others, they all did it differently.
But one thing I would point out is what UNIX branded OSes are still under active development? Solaris - no. HPUX - also no. Digital UNIX - can you still buy it? MacOS - yes, but how may people use it as a UNIX system, it's only really a desktop OS nowadays. UNIXWARE/SVR5 - well maybe, it's a little unclear what XINUOS are actually doing with it. And everything else is either NOT officially UNIX (think all of the non-certified BSD derivatives or GNU Linux), or has fallen by the wayside.
I know that Liam has a different view of firstly what is UNIX (no, the fact that Inspur K-UX and EulerOS were at one time certified against UNIX 03 does not make all Linux systems certified), and secondly whether AIX is actually still being developed, but AIX 7.3 was release a few years ago, and both 7.2 and 7.3 are still having patches provided, as well as new features added as new Power systems are delivered. Expect a new TL for both 7.2 and 7.3 when Power 11 systems start being shipped.
I've used (mercifully only briefly) a few IBM mainframes as well as the AS/400 - hated the mainframes and rather liked the AS/400, if only because the way its screens worked was surprisingly simliar to ICL's 2900 systems (I'd virtually grown up with George 3 on 1900's and then in the late '70s designed built a couple of computer systems for the BBC (COBOL with the IDMSX database) on their 2900s.
There were remarkable similarities between the AS/400 command language and VME/B (the ICL 2900's command language), such as both having a long form and a short form for all system commands and both supporting a full-screen prompt for both system and user-defined commands. The main differences were that VME/B long-form commands were much more readable than AS/400 equivalents and that the AS/400s I used only supported RPG and PL/1 (I don't like either) while at least I had COBOL and the IDMS database (itself written in COBOL) on the 2960.
Yes, my brother, but at least you had the advantage (?) of having a real 3270/5250 green screen (or at worst, a coax/twinax/TPR-connected PC 3270 or 5250 emulatior with a 'real' IBM-style keyboard). Take pity on us who supported ICI's technical computing infrastructure who had to access email and PROFS systems from VT100/200/300 (etc) terminals (although typically by the early-1990s PCs with emulation software) via emulation boxes acessed as yet another service hanging off the corporate PACX-based pseudo-network (stat-mux links between site-based Gandalf PACXs - or worse, via X.29 PAD/reverse-PAD over the corporate X.25 network. [PC emulation->PACX->PAD->X.25->R-PAD->3270-emulator->SNA network-> PROFS/VM]. I recall being on a study team circa 1988 to evaluate 'best practice' for accessing the origional PROFS service, and having some very odd systems and solutions for evaluation, and that appliance-based 3270 emulation was the least-worst.
But there again ... there was the massive outcry when PROFS was decreeded the corporate standard for office services from the company divisions who had already standardised on DEC ALL-IN-1 office so after a struggle, that was adopted as a co (but quite definitely junior) office standard (PROFS/A1), with some very complex DISOSS document transfer and translation stuff between the two.
On a related but not entirely similar note, one of our team was having issues with a Fortran 77 program on a mainframe (I think it was a Prime from memory but don't ask me which one). The program kept going into an endless loop and eventually being kicked out on time. These were the days when you submitted your job in a queue to be run. the problem was that in busy university term time it could be 12 hours or even the next day when your program results came back. The debugging was also pretty poor and message would read someting like "LOOP AT LOCATION X NOT RESOLVED" or something similar (can't remember the exact words but it wasn't particularly helpful for debugging).
Eventually we managed to get a copy of the program onto a Master 128 with co-processor, BBC Basic being sufficiently like Fortran to get away with only having to change some of the variable names. Within 2 days we had found the issue within the program which was trying to iterate towards a number with an excessive degree of accuracy and the bug reduced the size of the iteration such that it just ran out of time.
I loved my BBC
I can think of many Fortran 77 constructs that don't map well to BBC Basic, even Basic 4 on the Master and 65C02 second processor.
Either you wrote excessively simple Fortran, or you re-wrote significant parts of the program.
IIRC, it was possible to use the built in *EDIT command on the Master 128 to edit BBC Basic programs and re-tokenising them when you saved the file, making bulk text substitutions a little easier, but it still would have been quite a lot of work.
But I agree on your sentiments about the BBC Micro and it's surrounding ecosystem.
Oh, and Pr1me systems were generally regarded as super-minicomputers in the same league as contemporary VAXes, not mainframes.
A mainframe wouldn't just boot-up after power was restored, either. And we're not just talking about pushing a button, but issuing commands.
I'm guessing it was a smaller terminal supervisor/controller unit (whatever IBM called them) was power-cycled, allowing the terminals to talk to the still-running mainframe again.
for the article - I'd have understood if Simon was Gen-Z, and wouldn't recognise a BBC Micro from a Typewriter if one fell on his head. Or was the original picture selected by a sub-editor who wouldn't know the difference?
https://regmedia.co.uk/2025/03/24/shutterstock_bbc_micro.jpg
You'd be surprised how many Gen-Z can put the computer from a picture in the right time frame. I don't know what Gen-Z people you have around you, but those Gen-Z (born y2k +-5 years) who surround me are (mostly) great, high intelligent, good manners, overall impressive how well they do. Same goes for those "Oh the youth" complainers - my experience is the opposite. I know the other type exists too, a minority from my point a view, but then I look at their parents and can only think "they never have a chance, hope they wake up soon enough and see how dumb their parents are". 'cause you must know: Dumb parents can have genius children too! Add an education system which gives poor a chance for higher education, and it will improve the whole country.
Edit: Oh, and here the obligatory link to a Gen-Z guy, has a tumblr blog too.
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