Hi Folks

[OldBlueBear]

I am OldBlueBear-g4jht-Dave, or just Dave.
I started life as a (trainee) Rocket Engineer. involved with space probed. So got access to vintage mainframe machines and learned FORTRAN, using on 80 column Hollrith cards for programming. Although the odd 6 foot long slide-rules (or longer) still were in use.

Now I am long since retired but am now still basically a K&R C programmer and anything else came from getting involved with C (taught myself C in 30 days, from a draft version of the White Book) and UNIX (the AT&T stuff) in the late 1970s almost before it came out of MH Lab big time. By then I had moved on to FORTRAN-with-FORMAT on an IBM 1620 The IBM 1620 with its "ferrite-ring core store", that two hours to come up from cold, was the machine used to tracked Sputnick as it bleeped hi! hi! on 20 and 40 meters round the world. Long time ago!

I was in those days also Wireless Engineer, now a Radio Experimenter and Radio Ham based in the West Coast of Ireland. Here it is ideal for radio with low radio noise and no neighbors to complain about the aerials systems various!.

Was over the ensuing decades involved with DEC, HP and Sun both software and hardware (total systems concept) .

Currently I am attempting to bring up Solaris 8 on a Sun Blade 150. I say I am attempting as I have run into HDD size problems limited by address word size I think, 250GB HDD shows as 508MB, too small even for a "core" load - problem with vintage kit - so waiting on replacement HDD. Eventually I will crack it - patience needed

My longer term interests continue to be, the evolution of the UNIX both AT&T, BSD, and Sun variants.


That's me at almost 80, have a great day,
OBB(Dave)

 

[Ian]

Welcome to the forums @OldBlueBear - sounds like you've had a fascinating career!

Which space probes did you work on? I'm also an aerospace engineer, but didn't work in the industry for very long.

Glad to have you onboard, welcome to the forums!

 

[OldBlueBear]

Hi, Thank you for the welcome, glad to be aboard - was slightly bored until got the Blade running.

To answer your question ; it was all military stuff; with number-letter ids for both the payload and the launcher/launch. Then I moved onto onto small missiles, not the big Saturn 5 stuff, but small stuff fired from aircraft and then later onto "boxes of tricks" intended to jam missiles "seeker" and deflect them off course. Principally protection against missiles fired at ships. Was way back in the 1960 and 1970s . After that got into AT&T UNIX, then SunOS, leading onto Solaris. also C on Dec VAX, and HP machines and FORTRAN on IBM 360s and 370s. Work was telephone and network related, then onto systems to very large databases on SUN machines. At the time all experimental!

I have just in the last few days brought a SUN Blade 150 back to life, installed Solaris 8, but may have a duff memory chip as it threw a crash dump with a "bad memory" message. Still not bad for a 100 US dollar machine plus shipping. Only thing wrong was a duff CD-Rom drive, and put a new 120GB HDD in it as c0t0d0s2 the max obtainable. having failed with a 250GB HDD! Information on HDDs beyond 40GB was very thin on the deck, a case of buy one and try.

Started getting my admin and C skills back up, not touched a machine foe 20 years, it is coming back. Also playing "HF ham Radio" but condition not good.

Any SUN programmers or administrates out there, as it is always good to have a few brains to pick if I get stuck?

73, Dave

 

[Ian]

What a fascinating career! I almost went down the same route myself, but in the UK.

I've never used Sun systems before, but I'm sure there are a few other members here who are familiar with it