On Mon, 17 May 2010 16:08:29 -0500, Mike Raiford wrote:

> On 5/17/2010 2:54 PM, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> 
> 
>> Was anybody actually there? Did any of you guys see this happen? What
>> was it like? And did mainframes really come in bright orange cases with
>> inch-square glowy buttons on the front that randomly twinkle?
>>
>>
> ;) I remember as a kid in the 80's walking into an office that had a
> computer room. A real-life room-sized mainframe. One wall had a bank of
> tape machines, the CPU was a box the size of a Smart car sort of in the
> middle of the room, and there was a huge array of disks that took up the
> rest of the room.
> 
> All controlled by a tiny terminal in the corner flanked by an 8" floppy
> drive, and a few other binders and such.
> 
> It was quite neat to see!

My university had an IBM 4361 mainframe (IIRC), and I can remember in 6th 
grade going to a class where I got to play in the server room with some 
PDP mainframes (I helped with the backups one day).

My first job out of college had a fairly large AS/400 system (D40?  I 
think) and an IBM System/34.

The S/34 didn't have very many lights on it, but the AS/400 lit up light 
a Christmas tree when we turned the lights off in the bunker that was our 
computer room.

Jim

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