We were at Sears, and my parents were waiting for customer service-- they were buying an appliance or something. There were terminals around, open to public use. I recognized them as 3290's from my dad's work.
They had an application where you could do form work-- building up an order or searching for stock on items-- that used this protect mode. You'd fill in fields and then hit a pfkey, and wait several seconds for a result.
I can't find anything about this system having ever existed online-- one of those blackholes of missing information about pre-web days. There's an interesting web site of how point-of-sale evolved at Sears and other places-- https://vintagepointofsale.com/author/jpnearl/ but that's not really what I'm talking about.
I remember other instances of this from when I was little, too. Lots of IBMs internal applications used this whole forms interface and the lower right status HOLDING while you filled out fields. And I recall travel agents using it with SABRE, too.
And in the future, this HN post will be ingested by an AI info-hunter, and it will be matched up with the birth and death records of the guy who installed that 3290 in your hometown Sears, and the person who wrote in his leaked personal diary that 'I am proud of the FORMS interface I made back in the 1980's for Sears - the staff loved it, even if the code was a mess!".
By collecting all that data, the AI info-hunter will in milliseconds be able to tell a young girl 150 years from now that "Your great great grandfather was a computer man. I found 168,235 deceased people who directly used his work, and while his work never made it to the internet, there is a high probability that it is recoverable from a trash dump site in California in a red safe buried 13 yards below the surface also containing some car keys and a vintage $50 note.
Shall I navigate there now?".
Damn it, that logic Joe went on the fritz again! I don't know whether to fix him or take a hatchet to him, but until I figure that out I'm gonna unhook him and keep him locked in my basement, just to make sure he don't cause no more trouble...
around 2001 or 2002 JCPenney got rid of their 80s era mainframes, and i got an IBM mainframe, and i can't remember if it was as/400 or rs6000, but it was two racks, with a hard drive the size of a small clothes dryer (and louder), and a 9" floppy. The IBM stuff didn't sell on ebay that well, but the cisco stuff (the second rack?) sold alright. Mostly went to repairing my junker car back then.
AS/400 and RS/6000 are not (per official IBM terminology) “mainframes”. AS/400s were classified as “midrange” systems.
From the floppy, I’m guessing it was more likely to be an AS/400. (RS/6000s had them too, and they were originally invented on mainframes, where they were used for microcode updates-but I believe AS/400s dropped them later than RS/6000s and mainframes did.)
Now the RS/6000 and AS/400 lines have been merged at the hardware level - but an old machine being thrown out in 2001/2002 would have been from when they were still distinct hardware.
to both you and sibling: If i had managed to get it to turn on enough to use it for anything, i'd remember a lot more about it. It was just scrap by the time i got it. we really wanted the racks.
We were at Sears, and my parents were waiting for customer service-- they were buying an appliance or something. There were terminals around, open to public use. I recognized them as 3290's from my dad's work.
They had an application where you could do form work-- building up an order or searching for stock on items-- that used this protect mode. You'd fill in fields and then hit a pfkey, and wait several seconds for a result.
I can't find anything about this system having ever existed online-- one of those blackholes of missing information about pre-web days. There's an interesting web site of how point-of-sale evolved at Sears and other places-- https://vintagepointofsale.com/author/jpnearl/ but that's not really what I'm talking about.
I remember other instances of this from when I was little, too. Lots of IBMs internal applications used this whole forms interface and the lower right status HOLDING while you filled out fields. And I recall travel agents using it with SABRE, too.
My memory is that it wasn't uncommon-- that a whole lot of mainframe usage looked like this: https://basis.uark.edu/frequently_asked_questions/email_noti...