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How sad was I? I stared at these for hours....

Sloop John B

Sloop John B

And any old music will do…
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.sjb
 
You guys had monitors? All we had were grey, metal boxes with switches, coloured buttons and lights, and a robotic voice interface that said, "Working..." whenever we asked it a question.

Here's one restored to its former glory.


Joe
 
Back in the day when I started in computers working for ICL it was mainframes. The operator used to listen to the cpu on a little speaker on the operators console. If he heard it repeating for a period of time he would assume it was looping and kill the program. A colleague had a program with a sort procedure that was always being stopped because of the repetitive sound. So he printed a line to the operators console saying "This program is not looping. Only his program wasn't quite right. When he came in the next day he found an entire roll of operaors console printout on his desk with every line saying "This program is not looping"
 
slavedata said:
Back in the day when I started in computers working for ICL it was mainframes. The operator used to listen to the cpu on a little speaker on the operators console. If he heard it repeating for a period of time he would assume it was looping and kill the program. A colleague had a program with a sort procedure that was always being stopped because of the repetitive sound. So he printed a line to the operators console saying "This program is not looping. Only his program wasn't quite right. When he came in the next day he found an entire roll of operaors console printout on his desk with every line saying "This program is not looping"
Click to expand...

Strange what we remember - I too worked on ICL mainframes. But I do not remember any speakers at the console!

We customer engineers (in house at West Gorton) used to play Dungeons and Dragons as a 'test program' on overnight shifts.
 
Joe P said:
You guys had monitors? All we had were grey, metal boxes with switches, coloured buttons and lights, and a robotic voice interface that said, "Working..." whenever we asked it a question.

Here's one restored to its former glory.


Joe
Click to expand...

Is that on display at the Daystrom Institute?
 
JensenHealey said:
Strange what we remember - I too worked on ICL mainframes. But I do not remember any speakers at the console!

We customer engineers (in house at West Gorton) used to play Dungeons and Dragons as a 'test program' on overnight shifts.
Click to expand...

Perhaps it was a dodgy mod it was on smaller 1900 series.
My first job in customer support at ICL was part of a campaign trying to convince British Steel to invest in the just launched 2900 series. We had an early 2970 installed at Compower(British Coals internal computer section) in Doncaster. We ran a benchmark of BS 1900 jobs in multiple streams on the 2970. We soon learnt that if we organised workload so no programs started or finished together we got a better throughput. It certainly made me cynical about the validity of benchmarks. Lies, more lies and benchmarks.
 
slavedata said:
Perhaps it was a dodgy mod it was on smaller 1900 series.
My first job in customer support at ICL was part of a campaign trying to convince British Steel to invest in the just launched 2900 series. We had an early 2970 installed at Compower(British Coals internal computer section) in Doncaster. We ran a benchmark of BS 1900 jobs in multiple streams on the 2970. We soon learnt that if we organised workload so no programs started or finished together we got a better throughput. It certainly made me cynical about the validity of benchmarks. Lies, more lies and benchmarks.
Click to expand...

In the early 1980’s I worked on what I recall was a System 4 which had a speaker. The operators used to listen to the programs for loops as well. The local engineers preferred to be on call at the local brewery overnight as they had a beer tap in their office.
 
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