Greetings. Once upon a time long ago, I was sitting alone in the UCLA ARPANET site #1 computer room late one night when the high Santa Ana winds outside started disrupting power. Hit after hit, very dangerous for the minicomputers, disk drives, and other equipment in that room, since we didn't have uninterruptible power supplies back then.
I made some calls and it was decided I should shut everything in the room down. Everything. I phoned the ARPANET NOC (Network Operations Center) at BBN and explained the situation, since I was about to shut down IMP #1 (essentially, a refrigerator-sized router) on ARPANET which sat in a corner of the room, and doing this could cause disruptions if done in an unplanned manner. The IMP was *always* running -- I had never seen it powered down.
I worked my way around the room, powering down terminals and disks, and printers, and the power supplies on the 11/45 (ARPANET Host #1 - UCLA-ATS) and the 11/70 (Host #129 [1+128 on IMP #1] - UCLA-SECURITY. Back then my email addresses were LAUREN@UCLA-ATS and LAUREN@UCLA-SECURITY -- no domains yet.
The usual roar of the machines gradually got quieter and quieter, until only the IMP was left. I pulled down the power switch. Now there was dead quiet except the hum of the lights, a situation I'd never experienced in that room before. Very odd feeling.
Suddenly I heard a click -- the IMP was powering back up by itself. Damn. I pulled down the switch again. Quiet for a time, then click and it came back up yet again. Before I started thinking about screwing around with its power cables or turning off breakers that could have unexpected effects, I called the NOC again to ask them if they had any ideas.
"Oh yeah. We should have told you! There's a little switch that controls auto-restart. Surprise!"
So I found and flipped that little toggle switch, powered down the IMP again, and this time it stayed down. I had turned off the ARPANET -- at least at UCLA. -L
@lauren I will never, ever think of myself as an "Old Hand" in I.T. ever again.
My apologies and delight, J.D.
@jdhaight @lauren Starting at programming in 1968, and also working with computers from the generation before mine, I thought of myself as a computer OG through the 1980s and into the 90s. But in 1997 I became friends with a married couple, both programmers, that reset my attitude.
The two of them had worked together for Raytheon since the 1950s. The two of them were largely responsible for the code that operated the early OTH radars, the "DEW Line" or Distant Early Warning System. I frequently spent hours with them listening to amazing stories of how those early systems worked, the weird hardware that had to be developed, software methods they had to invent, on and on. After that I didn't feel like an OG anymore.
I mean, when I started we had Fortran compilers and everything. Lmao.
@randytayler @shuttersparks @jdhaight Indeed, COBOL is still *very* much alive and the demand for COBOL programmers is high.
@shuttersparks @jdhaight @lauren The DEW line is such a fun thing to read about, especially if you're old enough to remember it (I am), but not so old that you remember the magnitude of the perceived threat (for me, that came in the early 80s, not the late 50s!) https://www.bellsystemmemorial.com/pdf/dewline.pdf
@shuttersparks @jdhaight @lauren
My late mother worked in the Pentagon in the 1960s writing COBOL. Given that COBOL is *still* running for systems they've never been able to update, I like to imagine some piece of her code is still trucking along out there.