Thread View: alt.folklore.computers
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Started by schw... Scott Schwartz
Sun, 17 Dec 1989 05:34
virtual card reader jammed
Author: schw... Scott Schwartz
Date: Sun, 17 Dec 1989 05:34
Date: Sun, 17 Dec 1989 05:34
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One day last year I dropped by the office of a friend who works at the computer center here at psu. He and the other IBM gurus had a little problem. For some reason which I've forgotten RSCS wasn't working that day, and so print jobs were backing up on one 3090 waiting to get sent to the other. They were trying to get all the spool files transfered over and printed. I don't recall the exact tactic they settled on, but it involved networked virtual devices, using some other protocol: send the data to the virtual card reader of the VM system that had the printers. So the head programmer whips out a few lines of JCL and starts it all rolling. A minute later he gets an error message back: "Card reader jammed. Please reset." Huh? They all stare at the screen for a while. I say, "How do you do that?" "Hit the reset switch on the reader." They had to take the system down to fix it. -- Scott Schwartz <schw...@shire.cs.psu.edu> "More mips; cheaper mips; never too many." -- John Mashey
Re: virtual card reader jammed
Author: k... Ken Yap
Date: Sun, 17 Dec 1989 06:09
Date: Sun, 17 Dec 1989 06:09
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I don't know if any Australians get this newsgroup. I hope they forgive and correct my bad memory. At the University of Sydney they were using big Cyber mainframes for student jobs in the 77-79 timeframe. This was B.W. (Before Workstations) remember. The department was physically separated from the Computing Center by about 500 meters and jobs were submitted via a RJE station. The way Unix got a foothold on Australian territory was as a replacement for the CDC RJE software. Ian Johnstone and colleagues of the UNSW had heard of this software called V6 which universities could get for a pittance. What the heck, why not? After 6 man-months (I think) of C hacking, they had a standalone Unix image that handled all the RJE functions and was easier to maintain. The Sydney Univ. RJE system was derived from the UNSW code. Our station was a 11/34 with two line printers, a card reader and a teletype console. It read student jobs from the hopper and generated the commands and delays required to talk to the Cyber (no readahead in NOS). Piers Dick-Lauder, our resident guru, had dumped the OS image onto a pack of cards which was used to boot the system from the card reader. Each card had the starting address in memory of the contents so it didn't matter if you spilled the deck! This system served us well. Besides supporting Pascal teaching, there was an assembler and simulator for a PDP-11 written in Fortran used for teaching machine architecture. Imagine running a machine simulation in a batch job. In 1980 the department got a 11/780 and the RJE system was retired. They did some amazing things with Unix V32 (BSD was at Release 1 or 2) on that machine to support 60-80 users running ed and pi jobs. Some of that scheduling software was described in The Fair Share Scheduler (?) in a recent CACM issue. But that machine has a bunch of other stories.
Re: virtual card reader jammed
Author: pe... Peter da Silva
Date: Sun, 17 Dec 1989 20:13
Date: Sun, 17 Dec 1989 20:13
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In article <1989Dec17.0...@cs.rochester.edu> k...@cs.rochester.edu writes: > At the University of Sydney they were using big Cyber mainframes for > student jobs in the 77-79 timeframe. I remember that. It was a Cyber 72. I always thought it was odd you had to go off-campus to submit jobs. -- Peter "Have you hugged your wolf today" da Silva <pe...@sugar.hackercorp.com> `-_-' 'U` "I haven't lost my mind, it's backed up on tape somewhere"
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