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

114 pointselsherbini2y ago40 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!

40 comments

markus_zhang2y ago

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.

mixmastamyk2y ago

Also might simply let them talk and record it. Someone could later make a transcript.

mdaniel2y ago

https://storycorps.org/about/ is the formalized version of that, as well as archiving the stories in the Library of Congress. They air every Friday morning on my local NPR station, and the stories they air are very, very diverse so I'm of the impression they'll take anything they can get in the vein of preserving first-hand accounts of "the way it was"

norwayjose2y ago

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.