@jbz Yeah this is a good point about #IBM and counting people for #genocide that I think they used with #machines or #computers?

All tech is used against us, no matter how it's about #Cats and fun pictures too - the programmers and coders behind a lot are not doing the people work or caring for interacting with people (so you get Mastodon etc void of much social and just good for spreadnig #caturday pics and bad news... a real problem if not doing the positives...

So not doing the people-improvement / #trust building / real social interaction to get better ourselves... is not happening (where is it?)

(and not wait for rich people or spread their #shit using #Mastodon either).

#FreeSchool for real social ✊

I'm looking for the decent fish that can talk more than 5mins.
Do you even exist?

(3/3)…I've spent my entire career using #IBM laptops knowing this…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
…& then after IBM sold #Lenovo, I was then using laptops made by people w/ strong ties to a human-rights-violating regime.

So, let's have perspective: IBM has still never apologized for *literally* helping the Nazis & #Framework may still be the “least evil” of *traditional* laptop companies.

But, this incident does make me wanna desperately find way to make @mntmn's #MNTReform suit my computing needs.

Found the part number FRU 92F0437 on the board which is a IBM PS/2 486DX33 Processor Upgrade Card. Pretty cool!

https://eprm.ardent-tool.com/eprm0/2107.htm

#RetroComputing #IBM8580 #IBM

Ok what’s this. A card underneath the drive bay on the motherboard. I’m not sure how to get to it yet so enjoy these keyhole pictures.

Lots of GALs? Hypertec? An accelerator? Maybe that’s the 486?

#RetroComputing #IBM #IBM8580

I’ve never powered it on so let’s open it up and see inside.

Clean and tidy! Pretty sure that’s a SCSI card on the far left going to two HDs and a CD-ROM. Next to it looks to be a RAM card with 12MB in 3 SIMMs. Next to it an IO card of some kind. Also two “IBM FRU” cards (more RAM?). This thing feels tricked out for the time!

#RetroComputing #IBM #IBM8580

Curiously, this IBM PS/2 8580 is a 386 machine but it has a badge on the front that says 486?🤔

#RetroComputing #IBM #IBM8580

Getting things sorted for the VCF swap meet this Saturday in NJ. Pulled this IBM chonk from the basement. 20.5 kg of IBM iron. Good thing there’s a handle on top 😄

#RetroComputing #IBM

(3/3)…I've spent my entire career using #IBM laptops knowing this…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
…& then after IBM sold #Lenovo, I was then using laptops made by people w/ strong ties to a human-rights-violating regime.

So, let's have perspective: IBM has still never apologized for *literally* helping the Nazis & #Framework may still be the “least evil” of *traditional* laptop companies.

But, this incident does make me wanna desperately find way to make @mntmn's #MNTReform suit my computing needs.

I should add that I've done all of this using the s709 emulator from David Pitts (https://cozx.com/dpitts/ibm7090.html), using the eliza-ctss distribution from Rupert Lane (https://timereshared.com/). I'm sure both of these projects involved a massive amount of work, for which I'm incredibly grateful.

#retrocomputing #ibm #mainframes

4/4

Here's what's actually involved in doing a DSKEDT run (once CTSS is shut down and the CPU is halted):

1. Mount the DSKEDT tape (in drive A1 by default, at least in the emulator).
2. Execute 'load tape'. I believe this might have been a physical button on a real machine, which loaded the contents of the tape into memory.
3. Set the accumulator to be "CTSS ". I don't really know why you need this, but you seem to.

Next up is toggling the sense switches. I think you have three options: all down = start with REQUEST FILES, sw1 up = read cards and sw4 up = read the data which would be on the cards from tape A2. I actually used the sw4 version, having first mounted the tape.

Once you've done this you can hit start. The program will say it's started the tape drive, and halt. Then to continue:

4. Set sw4 down.
5. Hit start again. The system will process the jobs and then halt again.
6. Set sw2 up.
7. Hit start. The system will print 'EXIT CALLED' and you can shut down the emulator.

This process is really fussy, and it's super easy to get it to crash badly enough to require you to run a recovery program before you'll be able to try again (I think due to inconsistent state information for the DSKEDT program, not wider filesystem corruption). Many of the prompts output by the program are hard to make sense of, or seem to tell you to do the opposite of what you really need to do.

#retrocomputing #ibm #mainframes

3/n

Every now and then (the documentation seems deliberately vague about this, but says 'several times a day') a 'disk edit' program was run by the admin staff. This must have evolved over time - the earlier documentation refers to separate 'load' and 'dump' programs, and seems to have dumped the hard disk to tape backups and then reconstructed it every time (maybe from a time when the computer wasn't exclusively used for CTSS). The version I have is a single program, and I don't think it rebuild's the disk at all - it just executes the jobs in the queue - reading from REQUEST files and the card reader.

I loaded the MUSIC.FAP cards offline, i.e. I shut down CTSS, booted from the DSKEDT tape, and restarted CTSS once all jobs had been processed. The documentation does refer to it as 'background task', so I suspect there may have been a way of doing it without having to shut down the OS first.

A couple of things about old mainframes which seem unusual today. The first is that halting the processor is a thing - code is written to trigger a halt, the user then loads a tape, or flicks some switches, or something, and then presses a start button to get the CPU to continue. I suspect this stopped happening once you had time sharing up and running, but it crops up when administering CTSS. Secondly, you have sense switches and lights - these are literally a bank of toggle switches and lights which can be read or written to in code. The switches are used for configuration - presumably because if you're writing machine code by hand it's easier to use the built in 'jump if sense switch set' operation than it is to write a parser for a configuration file.

#retrocomputing #ibm #mainframes

2/n

Let me add a bit more detail on how this works. The #ibm7094 (specifically the one in the #MIT Computation Center which ran #CTSS) had a hard disk which was used for working storage. My understanding is that the preferred way of working was for users to enter files directly into the system via a teletype terminal, but the system did also have a card reader and multiple magnetic tape drives.

I don't think CTSS provided a friendly way for users to initiate loading from cards (although I'm not sure what there really was in the way of access control for the hardware if you were willing to write your own code). I suspect you wouldn't have had physical access anyway, so you would have had to have worked through the admin staff.

In practice, you would have done this by submitting a job. Jobs covered various I/O tasks, e.g. bulk printing, and for the most part could be submitted through an OS command (which wrote to a special file in the user's home directory). The one exception to this was card input, as that required the physical cards to be submitted to a helpdesk. Those cards were bookended by a metadata card (specifying the user and output filename) at the start and an EOF card at the end. In theory all of the job types could be submitted in the same way - except the 'deck' in those cases would just be the metadata card (and in fact the REQUEST in the users home directory was just an online representation of the same cards).

#retrocomputing #ibm #mainframes

1/n

My website and continuing mission for #IBM, #Lexmark, #Unicomp, #Lenovo and #TGCS #keyboard excellence has reached its sixth year! Like most past years, I have written this post to go over everything we achieved since September 2024 and to give my thanks! https://sharktastica.co.uk/announcements/202509A

My website and continuing mission for #IBM, #Lexmark, #Unicomp, #Lenovo and #TGCS #keyboard excellence has reached its sixth year! Like most past years, I have written this post to go over everything we achieved since September 2024 and to give my thanks! https://sharktastica.co.uk/announcements/202509A

Why painting their greed with a "fair" (out)look if IT's everything but fair #software, #opensource or #FOSS?

You
@EUCommission could lead by example and recommend @jitsimeetinstances , but promoting their #surveillancecapitalism solutions might be a boomerang. Don't you think?

Btw. Mugshot of #BillGates the 3rd on a bluescreen with #IBM PC5150 standing on shoulders of #DigitalResearch is a #vector #illustration made with #Inkscape, not #Adobe#Illustrator

Huge culture change at #IBM was when they started wearing Polo shorts...

... Everyone was wearing Polo shirts so it became the new uniform
🙄

Huge culture change at #IBM was when they started wearing Polo shorts...

... Everyone was wearing Polo shirts so it became the new uniform
🙄

Just in case you don't already have a million good reasons to avoid giving BorgSoft money, or eating any pie they've had their filthy fingers in ...

"Israel relying on Microsoft cloud for expansive surveillance of Palestinians"

#HarryDavies, #YuvalAbraham, 2025

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/06/microsoft-israeli-military-palestinian-phone-calls-cloud

... they're also the IBM of the 21st century, providing computer systems that help fascists do ethnic profiling more efficiently. Making them accessory to genocide

#Microsoft#Israel#Palestine#IBM #genocide

Just in case you don't already have a million good reasons to avoid giving BorgSoft money, or eating any pie they've had their filthy fingers in ...

"Israel relying on Microsoft cloud for expansive surveillance of Palestinians"

#HarryDavies, #YuvalAbraham, 2025

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/06/microsoft-israeli-military-palestinian-phone-calls-cloud

... they're also the IBM of the 21st century, providing computer systems that help fascists do ethnic profiling more efficiently. Making them accessory to genocide

#Microsoft#Israel#Palestine#IBM #genocide

Finally, the separate box of POWER9 upgrades appears. These are for the dual socket 144 thread Talos II here at home (the LC-922 are in colo). Relocation has turned up a lot of missing hardware, very pleased about this turn of events.

So, the long lost box contains:
- 4x Samsung 883-DCT 2TB SSDs for local storage ZFS pool (with 2x Optane NVMe cache)
- 3x PM863a 240GB SSDs for the OS
- always more RAM
- an OcuLink 4x to U.2 cable w/ Optane drive floating around somewhere
- Mellanox 50GbE QSFP28 NIC for RDMA fun

@dexter finally, we can continue the project with appropriate hardware

#homelab #power9 #ibm #freebsd #goodmorning #unpacking #servers #hardware #happiness