Sitting here initialising a 600 GIGABYTE LAcie hard drive that is no bigger than a short Jeffery Archer hard-cover book!
Just think about this - in 1972, a 30 MEGABYTE DISC in its drive was the size of a laundromat washing machine - yes 30 Megabytes.
I remember the computer room at Thiess Holdings in Kerry Rd Archerfield Brisbane where I worked as an evening shift computer operator on the NCR Century 100 and then the Century 200 (which boasted the multi-tasking operating system B3.) We had four large washing machine sized disc drives that allowed us to have up to about 120MB of data on-line at the one time!!
I then started thinking about the other room sized computers that I worked on and began reminiscing about the ICL kit at Prestige Holeproof in Sydney Road Brunswick in 1975. EDS 60's - each held 60 MEGABYTES of data
Found some stuff that old ICL afficionados will enjoy...
Who could EVER forget XPJC, XPJL and XSDC??
More on the ICL 1900 Series
submitted by Keith Smith
The executive was E3RM (for small 1900's 1901/2) and E6RM for the big
beasts (1903T, 1904, 1906). The small machines were designed in
Stevenage (Hertfordshire), while the large ones came from West Gorton
(Manchester). In general a user program written on one machine was
binary compatible with the other type of machine as the 1900 order code
was the same.
ICL programs on 1900 traditionally started with an X so that they could be distinguished from user programs (although a user could have a program that started with an X, but why?). The big flaw with the exec / program name relationship was when multi-programming arose. How could you have 2 programs of the same name loaded in the system. The problem was solved in E3RM/2903/ME29 by using 'slot' numbers. The slot refered to an instance in a process list table. So you could have multiple copies of the same program loaded in different slots.
Some utility programs:
- XPJ1 - Format a hard disk
- XPJ2 - Create the System Control Area to UDAS (Unified Direct Access Standards)
- XPJC - Allocate / Deallocate a file
- XPJW - Archive files
- DMAP - Disc map
- XSDC - Sort
- XPJZ - Re-organisation generator for Index sequential files
- XPLM - Plan compiler
- XPCK - Consolidator
- XEKB - COBOL Compiler
- XFAE - Fortran Compiler
- XALE - Algol Compiler
- XPJD - File list print (not as good as DMAP because DMAP sorted the list into alphbetic order)
- XPJL - File block print
- XPEU - Program library manipulation
