thunderdome
Member
Happy New Years to each and everyone on net tractor talk!!!
I didn't even try to make it to midnight.
My 9-5 job is I develop and maintain computer systems for major hospital systems.
Right now, I'm working for one of the largest hospital systems (top 50 in the Country) supporting a major system. Part of my responsibilities is 24/7 on-call for 1 week per month. I volunteered for this week since I haven't had a holiday on-call and wanted to give the other people a break. No problem as it's a quiet week.... until I realized I volunteered for year-end processing. Oh crap. That starts at midnight and burns the mainframe's CPU for all of Jan 1. Any burps must be fixed immediately and you can't stop until it's done. I went to bed early to get a few hours in before SHTF. Knock on wood, it's been running damn near perfectly.
I call it my "9 to 5" as it's the paying job to cover the expenses of my after-work hobbies.
I was startled awake about 3AM to the phone. It was a phone ringing in a dream that jolted me out of the bed.
I too started on System 360's. I don't even know the models/series anymore but they're fast and the best thing is that DASD is cheap so everyone has tons of it which is handy. No more counting bits or bytes.
I didn't even try to make it to midnight.
My 9-5 job is I develop and maintain computer systems for major hospital systems.
Right now, I'm working for one of the largest hospital systems (top 50 in the Country) supporting a major system. Part of my responsibilities is 24/7 on-call for 1 week per month. I volunteered for this week since I haven't had a holiday on-call and wanted to give the other people a break. No problem as it's a quiet week.... until I realized I volunteered for year-end processing. Oh crap. That starts at midnight and burns the mainframe's CPU for all of Jan 1. Any burps must be fixed immediately and you can't stop until it's done. I went to bed early to get a few hours in before SHTF. Knock on wood, it's been running damn near perfectly.
That ain't no 9-5er...I know of what you speak. I spent 40 years (1968-2008) carrying a pager and then a blackberry and being a slave to the whims of those big mean mainframes. They always needed attention on holidays and other times that 'normal' people got to spend eating turkey and drinking beer. After retiring it took me 2 years to not jump out of the la-z-boy everytime a pager went off on a TV show. Everything from BigBlue 360's to modern day servers(well modern in 2008). Don't miss it a bit. Made lots of money waiting around for something to go meltdown on Dec 31 1999 (Y2K).
I'm another one that spent many years hanging around the house phone, then carrying a pager, then a cell phone while waiting for those late night or weekend calls. I probably date you guys a little bit as I started with punch card equipment, then 1401's and a 7010, then 360 & 370. I liked the 4341s best of all because it seemed like they never went down.
I retired before all the server farms came, so have no idea what's involved with them.
Bob