Desktop PCs: So Yesterday

This is the mainframe model of the 70's and is all fine and good until the 'centrally-located computer' goes down.

Since business magazines cannot accurately predict business, why should we believe they can predict technology?

Dumb terminal redux, eh?

Time to dust off the old IBM 370???

Oh, and make sure the serial interface to my Apple ][ still works.

Hooker

IBM 370 .. you mean this...

http://pickprogrammer.net/InterestingStuff.aspx

hey .. those were the days

if you remember this you should also know IBM 029 Card punching machine !!!

Yepper, those were definitely the days.

And I think I once had an intimate relationship with that card punch. I must've made a gazillion cards. We used it to make NC APT language cards for post processing on the 370 which then produced our paper tapes.

I bet I can still read the cards and the EIA tapes without a printout.

And debugging was a trip too!!!!

Hooker

Yes, I agree with you. Crazy to think, but we had such an intimate relationship with that card punch machines!!! You knew every little noise it made to know that it did punch properly. Those ribbons that printed the characters on top - never really did a good job; but taught us how to read the holes pretty quick without them.

I remember giving the gazillion cards to the operator, only to be told that some of them were chewed up by the card reader - back to the 029. Taught a lot of perserverance to get the job done.

Well, memory lane is just wonderful - must be getting old. Thanks for sharing. See you around.

One of my most vivid memories is the day I dropped a 500 card deck before I got it in the box.

<sigh>

Hooker

It was the late '90s, and our PCs needed replacement. My boss had read in some business magazine that "thin client" was the next Big Thing. We tried to tell him that this was definitely a step in the wrong direction, but it was his decision.

He hired his son-in-law to convert our system over to thin client (you can see where this is going).

It was horrible. Nobody could get anything done. When we all complained, son-in-law said "it's not good for power users". His definition of power user: anyone running more than one simple program at a time. 75% of the computer users were engineers. Even the secretarial types normally had more than 1 program open. Heck, I'd say that >90% of the world are power users by his definition.

It took a few weeks to get new PCs and to strip out the thin client software

that depends. in india still people are working on desk tops.

since it a proven one in all respects it continues say at a reduced rate.