[TUHS] long lived programs

[paul.winalski@gmail.com (Paul Winalski)]

On 4/6/18, Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
>
The washing-machine
> sized machine could be driven to walk across the floor.

I had exactly that happen to me when I was a student operator of my
college's System/360.  We had a bank of three IBM 2311 disk drives
(each washing machine size; capacity 7 MB).  They were bolted together
and at the opposite end of the raised floor computer room from the CPU
and operator's station.  Facing the console, I had my back to the disk
drives.  One evening I heard rattling noises behind me, turned my
chair around, and was shocked to find the disk drives right behind me.
IBM customer service had forgotten to lock the wheels on the drives,
and they had crept across the floor.

> Vic Vyssotsky calculated that with only
> 10 times its 10MB capacity, we could have kept the entire printed
> output since the advent of computers at the Labs on line.

Last year I bought two 4 TB drives for backing up my home computer.
As I walked to the check-out, it occurred to me that I was holding in
my hands over a thousand times the entire disk capacity of the world
at the time I started in the industry.

-Paul W.