March 8, 2016 at 8:28 am
A previous gig of mine was with a city municipality. When I started, they had an older IBM mainframe. At our weekly meetings, the guy in charge of it would sometimes say 'We closed the month and were off by 5 cents. We found the problem', or 'everything balanced'. They later replaced it with a SQL Server ERP system that used an application server, no stored procedures, everything was RBAR. They never made those claims that they could reconcile utility billing after that.
Everything depends so deeply on the designers, developers, and those supporting it.
Another gig, U-Haul, had a 370. They mounted a crank on the side of the machine with a sign that pointed in two directions that said Faster and Slower. Whenever the jobs were running slow, the operators would go over and crank it up a little bit. It didn't do anything, but it made the operators a little happier.
That 370's IPL (boot) process started with a 1" stack of 80 column punch cards.
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[font="Arial"]Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information upon it. --Samuel Johnson[/font]
March 8, 2016 at 11:10 am
Wayne West (3/8/2016)
A previous gig of mine was with a city municipality. When I started, they had an older IBM mainframe. At our weekly meetings, the guy in charge of it would sometimes say 'We closed the month and were off by 5 cents. We found the problem', or 'everything balanced'. They later replaced it with a SQL Server ERP system that used an application server, no stored procedures, everything was RBAR. They never made those claims that they could reconcile utility billing after that.
I have been involved in cross-charging for telephone rental and calls in two different companies. The first one ran on IBM kit and often came as close as 2p in £70,000 per month. Some time later I was involved with a system using SQL (can't remember the initial provider but it then moved to MS SQL Server). The target was to get a difference of no greater than £50 in £300k - it sometimes (not often was as low as £10).
March 8, 2016 at 12:08 pm
I remember 370s. I started work in 1974 at a site with two 370/158 boxes, the largest one had a whole 1MB memory. They both ran OS/MVT, supporting 5 batch streams, a number of interactive (TSO) users plus apps running under IMS. The 158s IPLed (booted) from firmware, no punched cards or paper tape to be seen. Over time this all moved to 370/168 boxes and OS/VS1 then MVS, then in 1979 I moved to a different company.
One 158 box ran an online stores management system during the day serving about 50 user screens in different parts of the UK. Imagine, 50 remote screens served from only 1MB memory...
All the work came in and out over comms lines, apart from some printing no end-user work was done at the data center. The biggest changes I have seen since 1974 is that the screens are now in colour and larger, and the cost of serving that number of users is maybe 1% of what it cost then.
Back then I lived in shoebox in middle of motorway. Dad whipped us awake at 5am so we could lick road clean wi' bare tongue. Times were different then, you tell this to the kids of today and they won't believe you.
Original author: https://github.com/SQL-FineBuild/Common/wiki/ 1-click install and best practice configuration of SQL Server 2019, 2017 2016, 2014, 2012, 2008 R2, 2008 and 2005.
When I give food to the poor they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor they call me a communist - Archbishop Hélder Câmara
March 8, 2016 at 12:32 pm
EdVassie (3/8/2016)
... Back then I lived in shoebox in middle of motorway. Dad whipped us awake at 5am so we could lick road clean wi' bare tongue. Times were different then, you tell this to the kids of today and they won't believe you.
You had it lucky! We used to dream of living in a shoebox, it would have been a palace to us!
Thank you for flashing on one of my favorite Python sketches, I also have At Last the 1948 Show which supposedly has the original.
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[font="Arial"]Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information upon it. --Samuel Johnson[/font]
March 8, 2016 at 4:50 pm
Always a tough thing to do but we manage to address any problems after each audit.
March 8, 2016 at 4:56 pm
I haven't worked on in terms of admin/dev work, but I have worked with a few mainframes over the years, including 370s.
My comments on stability certainly applied for me. The OS and platform from IBM was solid. Patches here and there, but overall solid. It went down, certainly, but not at any rate compared to the constant reboots from PC based servers.
However it was difficult to develop on and changes were slow to come.
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