who here already worked with these ?

[Bruce Marshall]

On Monday 14 December 2009, vu Pham wrote:
> I remember one time one pretty old IBM technician came to my office for 
> rescuing some problems on the old IBM server ( not that old as listed in 
> the link ) my manger who used to be a system programmer for banks 
> talked to him and both were glad with conversation like "Haha, do you 
> remember the printer ... of the system ... ?", "Do you remember the huge 
> disks ... of the system ... ?"
> 

I remember playing music on some of the old printers  - Merry Christmas was 
one tune.   And probably "Coming 'round the mountain".

My first program ever was written on a 650 while in college.  They taught us 
SOAP  (Symbolic Optimizing Assembler Program)  but I couldn't figure out this 
'symbolic' stuff  so I just plugged it in as machine language.

The Optimizing part was because all memory, instructions included, was on a 
drum and the Assembler would optimize the placement of instructions on the 
drum for fastest access.