IBM Mainframes Marking 50 Years of Service (keyboard, how to, work, ink)

[sargentodiaz]

Monday, 07 Apr 2014, By Elliot Jager

It has been 50 years since the System 360, International Business Machines Corp.'s first mainframe computer, was introduced on April 7, 1964

Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com IBM Mainframes Marking 50 Years of Service

The headline brought me up short. 50 years? It's been that long?

And then I began to think about my first introduction to them. I was stationed at the Presidio of San Francisco. We would get massive computer printouts and, after reviewing them would make corrections in ink and then send them off somewhere to have the corrections inputted into “they system” - whatever that was.

It often took far too long to get the new information according to my boss. He wanted it done faster. So, I made my way down to the lower levels of the base to an old WWII converted warehouse where “the machine” was located. A quick lesson on punch cards and how to type in the data to make them work and I found myself in front of one of these:



So, as I sit here typing on my PC's keyboard, I shake my head and wonder – who on earth calls them “The good old days”?

[Southern man]

Fresh out of tech school in 1963, I went to work for IBM as a Customer Engineer. The first machine I trained on was the keypunch, in your picture. I ultimately ended up trained on verifiers, sorters, collators and accounting machines, all using the IBM punched card. The 403 accounting machine was about the most complicated electro-mechanical monster I ever worked on. Yep, I agree, the good old days were rough. I remember the introduction of the System 360.

[Josseppie]

Impressive on what we have done in 50 years. It will be fun to see what we do in the next 15.