Discussion of large systems

[Brad Parker]

"Chuck Guzis" wrote:
>On 1 Nov 2006 at 9:54, C Sullivan wrote:
>
>> As to WHY you'd want to do a sort onto tape, my To: field says this  
>> is the classic computer mailing list.  It sounds like a fun project  
>> for somebody who as an old PDP (and the space for six tape drives) or  
>> similar lying around.  Heck, it might even make a fun programming  
>> project to "emulate" it using a bitty box and some virtual "tape  
>> drives".  Lastly, it would make a great academic project for teaching.
>
>I suppose that if it was "performance art" that someone wanted to 
>create, the effect would be more spectacular if paper tape 
>punch/readers were used.  No reason why it shouldn't work...AFAIK, 
>all of the access in the algorithms is write/read/rewind; no fancy 
>random skipping.

Am I recalling correctly? I seem to remember watching the operators of
the (hmm.  370/158?) do that all the time.  The would run a big
merge/sort and plop a lot of tapes in drives - I think we had at least
5, maybe more like 7-8 tape drives.  Nice shiny vacuum column machines.
A joy to use and watch (course I never maintained them :-)

Originally we had something like a lowly 360/30 (this was in Wilmington
Del) but then a 370/158 was moved down from NYC.  All of the databases
were on tape - disk was only used for temporary storage for a long time.
Later we got CICS and more on-line disk storage, and (yowza!) things like
source code control.

That place ran 24x7...

I'm having PL/1 flashbacks. ugg. 

-brad