Delete comment from: Ken Shirriff's blog
I joined LJ Hooker as a Programmer/operator on 3rd September 1965 in Sydney Australia and we got one of the first 6 that were shipped into Australia. Prior to that we were programming, in Assembler and testing on IBMs machine down at the Pagoda near the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Our science teacher from my high school the previous year was teaching us programming and begged me not to tell anyone because he was only a few pages in front of us in the reference manual. The 1311 disk drives only held 11 million characters and we had to fit programmes into 32k. We had no console typewriter so we had to dial instructions in. The following year I joined an aftermarket company and when a customer came to the front desk to enquire after a part, we had to pull the system interrupt to stop the computer, load the enquiry in on a card and check the print out from the printer.
We found the disk drives were great for sleeping behind when we pulled the 24 hour shifts to implement systems. They threw out a lot of heat in that air conditioned room.
We definitely felt like pioneers.
Jul 7, 2020, 4:53:11 AM
Posted to Iconic consoles of the IBM System/360 mainframes, 55 years old