IT’s Robin Hoooooood, Robin Hoooooood, Robin Hoooooood
On Call What’s the saying? The more things change, the more they stay the same. Welcome to On Call and an account from nearly 40 years ago when one hard pressed engineer was dealing with a ham-fisted response to the policies of the UK’s Thatcher government. Today’s tale of public sector woe comes from a reader dubbed «Andrew» by the Regomiser who was working for a county council in the north of England. «They had IBM mainframes running PL1,» he recalled. «I was a programmer and also on call for problems.» Originally introduced in 1979 (just like the Thatcher government), the IBM 4341 Processor Andrew worked with was an impressive beast. Big Blue claimed compatibility with System/370 and a boost in execution speed «up to 3.2 times of a System/370 Model 138 with one million characters.» An IBM 3278 Model 2A console, with a breath-taking 1,920-character display and keyboard, could be used to operate the device and the processor used memory chips that could store «64,000 bits of information.» Heady stuff. «The languages in use were PL1 RPGII and Filetab,» explained Andrew. The council itself ran the rents and housing benefits system for all the local councils in the area.
