an ancient voice from the past

My technical experience in the past was built upon large IBM mainframes and rudimentary communications going back to 1960. I have decided to stay away from the bewildering complexity of today's jungle - I can't run fast enough any more but enjoy understanding and using the up front user functionality. However there is nothng new under the sun and I am intrigued at the modern day way of working in the IT shop. I compare the old with the new and enjoy watching the slickness of some applications and the mountain of **** that has been pouring into the arena for some time. I admire the sheer brilliance of some folk and despair at the antics of some individuals and even very large corporate members of our community. I look for the pride of the artisans in our world and the value of what the product will leave behind even as it approaches its sunset. The constant battle between the technical folk and the marketing is intriguing. I doubt if I can contribute much in the way of solving problems but hope that you will allow me to hang around the bar and and listen to the modern banter and reminise

 

Welcome aboard Gerry. It looks like we may be headed back toward a sort-of mainframe type concept. The 'cloud' being the 'mainframe' where everything is stored and us with our 'terminals' (smartphones/tablets/chromebooks).

 

Hi gerrybnz, Another Welcome to WindowsBBS. Hope you enjoy your bar stand and don't forget when it's your "shout ". Neil.

 

Gerry:

I grew up (kinda, from 33 on) working in crew training simulators at Boeing. We had a 707 sim with a Singer-Link GP4. It's equivalent to a micorprocessor was a rotating drum with a magnetic recording surface on it which carried 8 channels of the operating software. Specific operations took a specific number of cycles, and you could put Boolean equations (for lights and switches) while you were waitng for the result. Despit the weird computer, it was a pretty good simulator. Im not sure many people out there could still program GP4!

Our 727, 737 and 747 sims used Honeywell computers, DDP-124 for the smaller airplanes and a -324 for the 747. People nowadays are boggled by the fact that the processors ran a 30 Hz (not Ghz or even Khz). That was the slowest frequency below which the crew could sense instuments flickering!

We did a full 747-200 simulation, with weather (including thuderstorms and turbulence), the full West Coast radio navigation environment with all the Morse Code identifiers, a full flight engineer's console and and instructor's console with over 3,000 malfunctions that he could inject into the airplane performance. Pretty good for a computer with 64K words of 32 bits each (the equivalent of 256KB in today's terminology).

The processors were discreet components on circuit boards about the size of a napkin, and the system took about 1500 square feet of room space with several tons of air conditiong.

The good old days?