What's a fiche

So I'm getting settled into my new job in the first week on second shift. The new facility is very nice the Harris Mini Computer remote job entry (RJE) system has been replaced with an IBM entry level Mainframe ( 370/138). Lots of stuff to learn. One night the guys are talking about problems with the Fiche run. I'm like what's a fish run? So they explain, that Fiche is "Microfiche" which is similar to micro-film but it's on flat card instead of a roll. It was used to distribute large amounts of printed material in a very small form factor.

Waldenbooks generated book catalogs for it's stores on computer tapes that were sent to a third parties for generation and distribution.

I was learning lot's of stuff.... Things that mostly don't even apply anymore :) Thank goodness:

• Bursting - Post Processing of Printed output :Automated  Stripping the Pin-feeds and Separating the pages of special forms, like Purchase Orders.
• Decolating - Automated Separation of multi-part reports and removal of the carbon paper.
• Cleaning Tape Drives - Wiping down vacuum columns and heads with carbon tetra-chloride
• Job Entry with Punch Cards, including sorting dropped card decks, duplicating damaged cards... etc. 

I was also learning lot's of stuff, that is still with me to this day:

• Logic - in terms of analyzing what a job is doing and how to recover when it has failed. Things were still mostly batch. This was and  is what I'm am good at.
• The value of procedures. Not everyone is skilled in the last point so it can be very helpful if someone who is, provides the detailed recovery steps. Even if you are good at it.... Procedures can be especially useful in the middle of a crisis. When time for analysis is limited Procedures Rule!!!
• The value of logs that describe what has happened.
• The impact of system performance.
• The need for metrics.

That's it for now. 

My First Post :)

I have been working in Information Technology (IT for fans of the IT Crowd) for a very long time, specifically 1978, when I was 19. So I've seen quite a bit.  It's now 2014 so it's been roughly 36 years.

I had been a night watchman at Burndy in Norwalk, CT in their computer room which housed a Sperry Univac system. There were offices in the computer room, not an unusual situation in 1976. So I camped out in one of the offices for my shift, with nothing else to do I began reading manuals. As it turned out, this was the most auspicious thing I could do.

When my time at Burndy came to an end I was transferred to being a night watchman at Waldenbooks on Ludlow St. in Stamford CT. The Ludlow st. facility also housed a computer room (of sorts). It was a remote job entry system connected to an IBM Mainframe in California at the parent corporation. Carter Hawley Hale.

I wasn't in the computer room but I established a friendship with the 2nd shift computer operations staff. Once they realized I was familiar  with many of the concepts involved in their operation, including real and virtual memory, disk storage, tape handling, batch processing ... etc. They enlisted me to do most of the scut work, tape backups, job entry. About the only thing I wasn't doing was filling out logs and incident reports :).

Fast forward a year, I've given up on community college and looking for work. By chance I run into the shift supervisor from the Waldenbooks computer room it had been almost a year since I was rotated off the Waldenbooks account. He asks what I'm up to, I explain  that I'd quit college and looking for work. He smiled and informed me they had just moved into a brand new facility in North Stanford (Ludlow St. was a bit of a hole). With a new computer room housing a brand new IBM 370/138 as the Remote Job Entry Station. In other words a real Mainframe to submit jobs to a much bigger Mainframe. The arrangement seemed kind of silly and it was. But I was to be an Entry Level computer operator, such discussions  were way above my Pay Grade :). Which was now significantly higher than it was before... To be continued.