Ask HN: Questions for two 40 year IBM Mainframe repair and programmers

by elsherbini on 12/27/2023, 3:33:44 PM with 40 comments
Hi HN, I’m visiting my grandfather for the holidays. He worked for IBM starting in 1966 as a repairman in Alabama servicing everything from IBM 407/403 “grey iron” to 1401s, 360s, 700s and beyond. He got his training in the Marines, and become one of the first crop of IBM service workers that didn’t need an engineering degree. My grandfather would be on call and often have to drive hours in the middle of the night to service a computer that had issues when factories or banks depended on them to print checks or keep the business running. Biggest service customers in the area were a Goodyear plant, the Life Alabama insurance company, the local community college, a steel plant, and many banks.

His friend is coming to visit who was a programmer for these computers at a Goodyear plant that had 3000+ employees starting in the mid 1960s until around 2000. He started in the mail room and volunteered to become a programmer, back when IBM had training programs for companies to learn to use and program their their equipment. After the year 2000 he moved to a Life Insurance company as a programmer for another 10 years. During his career he programmed on punch cards, in assembly language, and later FORTRAN and COBOL.

There are all kinds of debugging in the field stories, such as when a magnetic drum memory at an airfield kept having issues, and finally they figured out when the radar from the tower pointed just right at the drum it’d flip some of the memory, or when fumes from the Goodyear plant were found to be eating through solder joints, making the mainframe at that plant the 2nd worst for IBM to maintain in North America (the worst was a tire plant in Canada, those fumes!).

What questions do you have for two ~80 year old computer professionals in small town Alabama who started work back when you could walk into the computers, and ended their career in the 2000s?

They are coming in about 4 hours from this post, and I’ll record the whole thing and do my best to answer your questions in replies on this thread!

  • by markus_zhang on 12/27/2023, 6:30:49 PM

    I'd very much like the two gentlemen to sit down and write a memoir about their mainframe days. The older technologies are particularly fascinating. It doesn't have to be a book, but if it is then they can crowd fund.

  • by norwayjose on 12/27/2023, 5:03:28 PM

    I worked as a field engineer on Honeywell mainframes in the late 1970s and later moved into programming so I'm always keen on hearing about the good old days when computers looked impressive. I'd be interested in hearing about their most challenging debugging problems. I'd also like to hear about how your grandfather serviced core memories back in the day. Honeywell core memories had spare bits built in which made is easy to bypass a failing sense amp.

  • by 1920musicman on 12/28/2023, 1:53:21 AM

    Would love to know whether security was a concern at all on those systems (eg industrial espionage, internal program meddling for the purpose of tricking auditors, etc). And if yes, then what are some interesting stories about investigating and resolving security issues.

    Thanks for doing this!

  • by fuzzer371 on 12/28/2023, 3:23:06 AM

    What was it like "volunteering to become a programmer" back in those days? Did you know what you were getting into, or did it just sound better than working in the mail room? Was "Programmer" a well respected job at the time? Were you seen as a sort of magician working on the mainframe? Or the equivalent of a "grease monkey" changing oil in a car?

  • by matt_s on 12/27/2023, 11:52:40 PM

    Might be too late but would love to hear some stories of things they had to do because of space/speed constraints (storage, RAM, registers, CPU, etc.)

    Edit to add: we are very, very spoiled in todays computing age as far as constraints goes

  • by shermantanktop on 12/28/2023, 5:30:04 AM

    The current set of developers are often tempted to start again - to start a new software codebase which will surely fix all mistakes of the old. Was this a temptation in the days of big iron?

  • by cschep on 12/28/2023, 1:51:00 AM

    Curious if they think they would be interested in a career of programming starting today?

  • by shrubble on 12/28/2023, 2:54:26 AM

    Did he ever work on the System/3 or System/32 devices? (I am looking for a System/32 but there are very few around!) Also what was his favorite machine and why?

  • by scrapcode on 12/28/2023, 2:02:15 AM

    Were there any parallels between the systems they worked on and helped bring into this world and the modern era with "supercomputers" and AI, as far as people being worried about the technology replacing their jobs?

    Did they have much of a network or reference to lean on when novel problems would come up, or was it more of a "figure out a way to make it work" way of troubleshooting?

  • by CoastalCoder on 12/28/2023, 1:32:57 AM

    I don't have specific questions, but I'd love to hear whatever stories they're most interested in sharing.

  • by graymatters on 12/28/2023, 11:38:42 AM

    Given what they’ve seen almost 60 years ago and today - can they extrapolate what will the computing field look like in another 60 years? What tools/techniques/methods from the past do they miss the most? Which of these do they think could/should be adapted to current realities and used to greater effect? What are their top 3 do’s and don’ts from those times?

  • by skissane on 12/28/2023, 4:05:47 AM

    Do they still have any documentation (service manuals, schematics, etc)? Might they be willing to donate any of them to Bitsavers for scanning?

  • by me_here_alone on 12/28/2023, 2:48:48 AM

    As a recently retired IBMer, I would love to know what the think of IBM today vs when they worked there.

  • by zed716 on 12/28/2023, 1:43:38 AM

    I'm curious in regards to repairs (and perhaps this is just stupidity on my part): Were spare parts for repairs kept on-site, did they have to be ordered/shipped, or did your grandfather have a, er, service truck with parts, etc?

  • by julianeon on 12/28/2023, 2:01:57 AM

    What parts of the computing landscape today remind them the most of what it was like to be a mainframe programmer?

  • by bjornlouser on 12/28/2023, 1:45:51 AM

    Did either ever come close to leaving the field? If so, what made them want to quit tech?

  • by dpflan on 12/28/2023, 7:54:16 PM

    When will there be replies? I see OP’s latest comment is from 4 months ago…

  • by helf on 12/28/2023, 3:28:33 AM

    Oh! I would like to know what sort of reliability and headaches they had out of different types of memory! Drum, core, film memory etc.

  • by helf on 12/28/2023, 3:27:01 AM

    Oh wow. The Goodyear Plant must be the one in Gadsden AL which is my home town.

    I would love to hear what they think of the advances in technology from when they started till now; on the software side: which machine series they liked dealing with the /least/ and wich the most and why. What operating systems they liked the most.

    Any fun anecdotes about user issues, idiotic design quirks they dealt with etc.

    Also, if they have any old ephemeral like notebooks, manuals, etc? That sort of thing would be a treasure to scan in and send to archive.org and bitsavers!

  • by KyleSanderson on 12/28/2023, 2:17:05 AM

    Stance on the golf club memberships winding down? Alcohol at socials and blue Jean Fridays would be interesting.