Re: System 34

[jcbradley@xxxxxxxxxxx (John C. Bradley)]

>snip----
>
>For the younger folks on the list, the S/34 was introduced just after
>electricity became available.....

When our S/34 was delivered 3/5/80, we thought it was pretty high tech.
It had 128K RAM and 128 MB disk (two 8" piccolo drives with 64 MB each) 
and the traces on the PC boards were thinner than anything I'd seen up to 
that point (the year before I had moved from electronic design to starting 
up our DP department).  People gathered in wonder to gaze at the 600 LPM 
3262 printer do its thing.  The S/34 replaced a Sycor 440 which was based 
on an Intel 8085 8-bit processor which used a 64K memory space.  The Sycor 
implemented a memory bank switching approach to have 4 X 64K memory and 
it also had a 14" 2.5 MB disk which I upgraded to 5 MB.  The Sycor was 
programmed in COBOL and was supposed to support 8 users, but we found that 
throughput died when we added the 5th terminal.

On the S/34 we used RPG and COBOL, ran MAPICS-I and uploaded data over 
a leased line at 2400 bps to a mainframe.  That 2400 bps figure was pretty 
hot stuff at the time.  People were doing their email using portable TI 
thermal typewriters with acoustic couplers at 110 or 300 bps.

Around 1970 I had programmed a PACE vacuum tube analog computer 
while in school . . . it used a +/- 100 voltage swing to represent numbers 
to an accuracy of a percent or so plus motorized potentionmeters as
multipliers. 
I was the only one in my class to learn the Pace and I did so because every one 
else was lined up in front of the two transistorized analog computers that 
the school had.  They only used a +/- 15 volt swing and were "safer".  The kids 
were scared of the PACE.

My first digital computer experience was a Fortran IV level F class in
Spring 1965 
at the University of Kansas.  We punched cards which were then batched through 
"something," I guess an IBM 1401 that some of the other list members have
mentioned. 
One day the instructor came in and said "Don't EVER use this command in your 
card deck again!" and chalked in letters about 18" high on the board "$IBSTOP." 
Apparently it did everything but turn the lights out.  Must not have been much 
of an operating system.

We used the S/34 for 3 years before going to a System/38.  The S/34 was very
reliable.




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