Sysadmin snippets — Intro
Experiences from when I was not just a developer
In my time at Griffin Coal Mining, I moved on from straight programming work to becoming the sysadmin responsible for the VAX 11/780 “mainframe”. I think this was around 1985..1989.
The head office was spread over three floors and a related company was a couple of floors below us. They had their own, much smaller, VAX but we only provided housing and occasional support on tough issues.
These things were like giant space heaters in a computer room with a raised floor and arctic level air-conditioning. I used to keep a thick sweater at work because the temperature in the room was often around 15C.
There was a huge power conditioner humming away in another room — the scariest thing I ever saw was a tech doing live maintenance on that, putting his head and shoulders inside whilst it was powered up.
That VAX had a very small amount of memory. I can’t remember but seems likely it was only 8MB and the most it could have been was 128MB. That sounds tiny by today’s standards but contemporary PCs had 640KB and an Apple II had 4kb standard, expensively fully-specced at 48KB.
The VAX had a forest of ports out the back — I think a total of 80 serial ports going to terminals in the building and via a leased line to a coal mine about 250km…
