[Info-vax] VAX 6000 on Young Sheldon

[Rich Alderson]

bill <bill.gunshannon at gmail.com> writes:

> On 2/7/2023 5:35 PM, Scott Dorsey wrote:

>> gah4  <gah4 at u.washington.edu> wrote:

>>> The 360/30 is a little bigger, and might not have that.

>>> Some will question exactly how big one has to be to be a real mainframe.

>>> And VAX were some that had that asked of them.  Even in the beginning.

>> Being a mainframe is less about size than about I/O throughput.  The vax
>> was no mainframe.  The DECSYSTEM-20 was a mainframe.  DEC's customers knew
>> the difference even if DEC's marketing people had no clue.

> Did anyone other than the DECSYSTEM-20 users think it was or call it a
> mainframe?

I can answer this one.

I'm best known in c.o.v. as the annoying PDP-10 guy who points out that
wonderful things in VMS were often done first in TOPS-20 (or occasionally
Tops-10), but my experience with mainframes goes back a lot farther than that.

"My" first computer was an IBM 1401, a 12K character behemoth with dual 1311
disk drives (400K total, IIRC).  I learned FORTRAN IV on that machine, and used
a friend's programmed learning textbooks to teach myself PL/1 and COBOL (used
his account to do homework on a 360/40 running DOS/360).

My girlfriend bought me Germain's book on System/360 programming for graduation
(high school), and I taught myself 360 assembler from that.  I got a job working
for the CAI Lab at UTexas on those credentials as a freshman, where I was
exposed to the IBM 1800 as well as a 360/50.  After a break, I went back to
college at Ohio State, where I first did some CAI lab work, then got hired as a
student/faculty help desk person for the College of Administrative Science,
where I did a lot of PL/I programming and wrote a COBOL intro course for the
CAI folks.

In grad school, I wrote a 360 assembler version of the Life game, without
access to a computer for two years until I transferred from Yale to UChicago.
I worked the help desk for the Comp Center at UofC, then as a half time
programmer, mostly on the 370/168 => Amdahl 470 but some exposure to the DEC-20.

After finishing classes on my doctorate, I went to work full time as a
programmer/analyst (PL/I and COBOL) for a couple of years, and did database
work on the -20 towards the end of that.  I then transferred to the systems
staff, and did systems programming on the 470, the DEC-20, and a 4341 we used
to get off SV and onto MVS while the 3031 was installed.; I wrote a PL/I
program which read SVS JCL and converted ACF2 to RACF for MVS.

So I think my mainframe credentials are solid.

The PDP-10, whether running Tops-10 or TOPS-20, is a mainframe computer.

-- 
Rich Alderson					  news at alderson.users.panix.com
      Audendum est, et veritas investiganda; quam etiamsi non assequamur,
	  omnino tamen proprius, quam nunc sumus, ad eam perveniemus.
									--Galen