In the late 1960s I worked on a project at the Post Office in London that used System 4s and Spectras, both clones of the IBM 360 mainframe.
The hardware had been bought for National Giro, the government's bank-for-the-ordinary-man, based in Bootle, Merseyside. Unfortunately the bank was not as sucessful as predicted, leaving a lot of spare hardware.
Rather than admit the Giro's lack of success, the Post Office created a number of new projects and pretended that the hardware had been bought for theses projects. So I ended up as one of the designers of a real-time operating system that was to support a system for managing long-distance phone lines.
The project included about 40 new graduates and, as I was the only one who knew anything about computers, I got to design part of the system and to work on the operating system's memory management.
After the project had been going almost a year we had some minor management changes, including a women who thought that the project seemed a lot like the project that her husband was working on in another Post Office building. It turns out that the two projects were identical!!
The two projects were chopped in half and the back-end of one merged with the front-end of the other.
This removed the justification for the operating system, so I was re-assigned to lead a team of Cobol programmers. The programmers were sent on a Cobol course while I was given a copy of Daniel McCracken's book on Cobol..
I so enjoyed Cobol programming that I set about looking for someone who needed an operating system designed..
Of course the RCA Spectra wasn't a full clone of the S/360, as it was only fully compatible at the non-privileged level, something I got to know intimately. Consequently, it couldn't run IBM operating systems and application portability was not what it might have been (and effectively caused RCA to pull out of computing business). We had to wait until Gene Amdahl before true IBM clones arrived.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I have a connection with System 4s myself. I joined what was the Post Office in late 1979 to work on the System 4/70s at Harmondsworth. For a number of years, I worked on the development of Monitor, the OLTP operating system that was developed in conjunction with CDC and ICL for handling air cargo at Heathrow Airport (before my time). Ironically, that was all reported back onto IBM compatible mainframes in the early 1980s to run a number of BT systems (all now gone) and the RAF stores handling system (previously on S4). I think the latter might still be running.