Party Vibe

A place I worked at in the late 90s/early 2000s still used 8″ (200mm) floppy disks for some ancient 1970s development system that was still in use for programming some equally ancient and obscure equipment that the BBC had installed in London.

(for those who are way too young to have seen such a thing it is the disk on the left; although that one is from the Soviet Union :laugh_at: )

I downloaded the actual report and looked up the info on the IBM minicomputer thie DOD system is based around ( a custom Series/1) – once again both the tech sites and the mainstream news have spun this to make it worse than it seems. there is to be fair some sense in what the Pentagon are doing.

There are plenty of second hand parts still available as IBM kept making these computers well into the 1980s and only stopped marketing them at the end of that decade (hinting that they still kept inventories of spare parts). also way less combat-ready nuclear warheads in the USA than there were in the 1970s/80s; so less data would be going through this system (its capacity is limited compared to modern computers).

The only real risks are that the programmers who know how to keep these systems working are getting old and 8″ floppy disks have not been made for some years now; although if they the 80K format it does mean they are less likely to suffer corruption and folk who run computer museums and/or collect old computers regularly report successfully reading floppy disks from the 1970s provided they have been stored carefully. Systems like this are also most likely to be still carefully looked after by middle aged folk who are themselves parents and grandparents (it would not surprise me if this team is way more gender and ethnic diverse than todays USA startup/internet companies) – otherwise the world would already have been blown to ash because one of these kids decided to host the thing on a cloud instance linked to Comcast residential cable so in order to pocket the $$$ or deliberately fucked around with stuff because they got in an argument with someone else on a social network or turned down on some dating app.

in the late 80s there was an anarchist bookshop in my town (Reading, SE England); this bearded hippy dude who looked much like some of the maths teachers at my high school (and probably went drinking real ale with them at weekends) hoarded all sorts of 1970s era computer parts in a room above the main shop; (mostly Digital Equipment (became HP/Compaq) as their UK headquarters was in Reading.

he sold for cheap prices to younger folk who might have a use for them (some things like power supplies can of course be used for other equipment like audio circuits; radio transmitters if they are not too noisy)

Equipment of that era could be repaired down to the individual components (at age 16 I did work experience at British Telecom and had to put together an industrial grade CP/M workstation and connect it to the serial network; but it had a knackered line driver chip which I had to identify with an oscilloscope; unsolder the bad one and resolder a good one. multi layer circuit boards and surface mount components were not widely used then (which is just as well as they are far smaller and fiddly to work with).

Alternatively I’m sure that IBM could still supply an equivalent modern system that would still run the legacy code – although there might be some angst about it now mostly being made by Lenovo in China; although to be fair the Chinese don’t want USA blown to ash either as they won’t be able to sell them any more smartphones.

To be fair the stuff I did back then was fairly normal for my generation across Europe; although young people in NL, DE and DK (both lads and lasses) already often had access to far better equipment at home or school – their countries PTT would already have decomissioned the sort of computer I was repairing at BT in 1987 and either donated it to a school or sold it on the surplus electronics market (where a similar beardy chap and quite likely also a Kätzin-Mädchen wearing a sensible knitted jumper would have hauled it into a VW-camper van and either used it for running the anarchist bookshop or it would have ended up in the room of a young teenage hacker).

A lot of these teens are now my age and still have rooms full of their equipment and projects from the 1980s (and are still updating them).

The only reason your generation has not worked as much with real electronic components or encountered such devices as oscilloscopes is during the 1990s everything moved towards even smaller components and ready built equipment became much cheaper. In some ways this is good but it meant a lot of skills were lost or not learned.

As I am working on controlling a miniature printer via a serial link I will create another thread to demonstrate what some of this equipment is and why it is useful..

@tryptameanie 984211 wrote:

One thing thoug, at the end you say IBM could probably knock them something up that could run the legact code, unless this is some super exotic system, it could be ran on a virtual linux or even windows machine after a few hours and some bored nerds to check it out.

Although the exact system used is understandably still classified; it is unlikely to be much different from any command and control / computer aided dispatch network used by the military or civillian uniformed services across the world.

There are some oddities peculiar to IBM systems such as the use of different character encoding and it really is the kind of project that should only be entrusted to more mature people with some idea of humanity as well as tech skills.

Unfortunately it is likely that many of the original engineers have long since emigrated to Europe; as they are more likely than many Americans to have some idea of its geography due to having had to enter the data of all the NATO missile sites into this system 😉