All Terrain Thinking

A Compendium of things I think are Important

Historical Perspective on Today's' PC

Allan's 3 Meg Floppy disk and other memories

Click Image For 1200 x 960 Image 3meg Floppy Disk 3meg Floppy Disk Centenary Tie Centenary Tie Keys Holder Tankard Wallet	Ed, I have attached some pictures: A couple of pics of the old 3Mb floppy disc as used on the B90's, in and out of its protective sleeve. A couple of pics of an old Burroughs Centenary tie, issued around the mid eighties A leather Burroughs keys holder A Burroughs tankard A leather Burroughs wallet still in its packet The clothing/accessory items, along with about half a dozen pastel shirts, embrodiered with the word "Burroughs" on the shirt pocket, were issued to us on an annual basis and gave a good professional look, something a lot of organisations seem to have lost these days. One of my young hardware engineers who works for me in NZ spotted the 3Mb floppy in its sleeve and said "what a cool mouse mat" ... kids of today eh!! I must admit I really enjoyed working for Burroughs they were a good company but after staying in South Africa for nearly five years, my original plan was for one year, I decided to return home to the UK where I've since worked for Olivetti (8 years) and IBM (9 years) and more recently DTSL over here in New Zealand. During that time, like you, I've seen some major advances in technology. I can recall working on the Burroughs 201 drives that contained two platters, each 12 inches in circumfrence, with only a 9Mb capacity that seemed huge. You can now get USB pen drives with 64Gb on them. It's no use trying to describe this technology to the young ones they just look at you like you're from another planet, not just another era! Anyway, If I come across anything else I'll flick it over to you on another email. Best regards, Allan (UK, South Africa, New Zealand)
Hi Ed,     I worked for Burroughs in South Africa from 1982 to 1987 and spent many of those years working on a variation of models of equipment:   ·         B80 ·         B90 ·         BMT ·         B20 ·         B22 ·         B25 ·         S1000 ·         S3000 ·         TC range (although only the tail end as they phased out) ·         F45 (this was a badged unit which produced car licence discs for the South African government, it may have been unique to RSA)   These were the days when you had a schematic and an oscilloscope and you fault found the error down to component level, the good old days !!   I unfortunately never got to work on the larger equipment, B5900 & B7900 mainframe units.     I take it that you are an ex Burroughs man yourself?   Rgds,   Allan
Allen, I must say, some of this equipment, I have never even heard of...., My Burroughs life began with the L-6000 series using SL3 and graduating up to SL3/5 on the L-9000. For those who do not know SL3/5 was a Macro-Assembler Language with a variety of interesting commands. It also allowed for "Memory Mod". An "In-Memory" code modification while the program was running. This modified code could also be saved to either "Paper Tape" or "Data Cassettes". After a year or two, I graduated to MPL-II on a B-80 series and later to COBOL on the B-90 and B-900 Series machines. In the 1970s and 1980s we actually had (and extensively used) some tools that today would be called "Real Trace and Debug", and cost you a small fortune, per seat. (For the younger .Net programmers out there), No, I am not talking about the famous COBOL "Display Statements", denigrated by so many, these were real "Direct Code and Storage" interrogation and manipulation. And you thought those tools were a "New Thing". Ed

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