Posts by naylorjs 31 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Nov 2011
Bank security up until 2000 was quite lax in many ways. I had to transfer a sizeable amount of money (in the £1000s) from my UK account to my new Swiss account for the deposit on a flat.
I phoned my UK bank, a major high street brand which still exists, and only had to confirm my name, UK address and account number and of course my Swiss account number for it to be transferred. I would sincerely hope that this wouldn't be possible now.
The biggest issue was that my Swiss account number had a letter in it and full stops which caused no end of fun entering it into the system at the UK end.
shutdown -h now for a second time: Mag editor fires parting shot at proprietary software
I had the misfortune to have had my CV doctored by an agency. I should have sniffed a rat when I was asked to read my CV before the interview by the pimp, not something I've been asked to do before or since. To my shock, one of my existing skills was vastly overblown. I should have told my potential "employers" at the interview there and then what had happened and got him on their black list. I got the contract and was able to do the work that was given to me, but the agent turned out to be a real wide boy and was bad at paying too, I did drop him in it for that. I was very happy to get out at the end of the six months. BTW this wasn't in the UK if anyone is interested.
I went to a presentation on OS/2 1.2 at IBM South Bank in the late eighties. Afterwards we went for drinks with some of the younger IBMers (this was when IBM was still the evil empire) and found out that they were all BSD UNIX geeks. We were chatting about software development and it turned out that they were doing OS/2 Presentation Manager development at Hursley.
They asked us about what systems we had, we told them we had an IBM 3090/600E (about £6M at the time), and they casually mentioned that they had about ten of those "in the cellar". We never got a tour either :-(
The S/390 name is a hint to its lineage, S/360 -> S/370 -> S/390, I'm not sure what happened to the S/380. Having made a huge jump with S/360 they tried to do the same thing in the 1970s with the Future Systems project, this turned out to be a huge flop, lots of money spent on creating new ideas that would leapfrog the competition, but ultimately failed. Some of the ideas emerged on the System/38 and onto the original AS/400s, like having a query-able database for the file system rather than what we are used to now.
The link to NASA with the S/360 is explicit with JES2 (Job Execution Subsystem 2) the element of the OS that controls batch jobs and the like. Messages from JES2 start with the prefix HASP, which stands for Houston Automatic Spooling Program.
As a side note, CICS is developed at Hursley Park in Hampshire. It wasn't started there though. CICS system messages start with DFH which allegedly stands for Denver Foot Hills. A hint to its physical origins, IBM swapped the development sites for CICS and PL/1 long ago.
I've not touched an IBM mainframe for nearly twenty years, and it worries me that I have this information still in my head. I need to lie down!
While I wouldn't call mine a pleasurable experience, it certainly was nothing like the OP's experience. I walked like John Wayne for about a week and had to be careful sitting down, but the old man was active again within five days and I haven't looked back since.
I have heard that the reversal operation is dreadful though, bur that isn't on the cards for me.
I can second (or third) that. In the early noughties I had a house that I was trying to sell which was empty, yet I kept getting snotty letters threatening legal action for not having a license. If you looked in the front window you could clearly see the lack of furniture and the TV antenna cable lying on the carpet. In the end, I sent them a letter explaining this again, and asking them to book a court date, and telling them that they would lose for sure. They stopped after that, presumably they'd sent one of their drones to actually check the reality of the situation. Tossers.
BTW Unlike others I don't begrudge paying the TV license fee, I love BBC4 and shows such as Dr Who.
You're right about the BASIC on the ARM. As well as being one of the better BASICs around, with proper control structures, it was incredibly fast.
I wrote various programs in both C (compiled with the Acorn ANSI C compiler) and BASIC and in almost every case the BASIC version ran faster. This included number crunching programs.
Amazing!
My CV is totally honest and it makes life a lot easier at interviews. However one agency I dealt with in Belgium changed my CV (adding length of experience, some minor new skills) without my knowledge and I was presented with the new version in the car on the way to the interview. Looking back I should have dished the dirt on the agent at the interview, but I wanted the contract. It turned out alright, and the contract didn't call upon my new skills (ahem).
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