Not the original image, but the same machine (Honeywell Bull DPS-6 GCOS 6 MOD 400). On the left side is the central processing unit with "a lot" of memory (maybe 512 KB or 1 MB, I can not remember), beside it is a tape unit for backup purposes (our first task in the morning). Two disk units are located to the right, both of them with a "tremendous" capacity of 300 MB hard drive, which can never fill up. (We succeeded!). On the top of the farther is a "cake-box" for the hard disk - that is, they were cca. 40 cm in diameter! (The tape unit also has one on its top). Moving to the right you can see one tape-stand. So they are not an audio-cassette tapes in size! On the the right end there is a line printer. Noisy and fast printing - it was capable to "spit" a full box of A4 banner (an endless, at the edge perforated paper) in an hour.
This is a typical image (also not original). On the left is a Tape Unit. You can see that it was a large, nearly empty cupboard, with a couple of electronic cards, mechanics, etc. A bottle of fine brandy stands excellently in the lower part. To the right are papers for printing, they are followed by an iron locker, because the tapes had to be protected. There are teminals on the right with keyboards on their tops.
The type of the terminals was VIP7300 and somehow it was like the one above were located during work. Please ignore the lack of cables, since it is the original device out of order. In functional state we kept in touch with them to the central unit, ie, the commands are issued through it and we wrote our programs too. The screen had a diameter of 12 inches, if I remember correctly. "Low Radiation" logo wasn't anywhere!
I say only for today's young people that we were working in text mode, so that each command was typed into the terminal. On these terminals the characters appeared in green on a black background. Here's a little taste of the operating system commands from the 400-page users guide:
List of all commands
PRINT command
So what we had to keep in mind!
Later we used to work with more "user friendly" HDS-5 terminals.
In the new design orange characters appeared on the black background! Unfortunately there is no screenshot.
Close up of a central unit. 5.25-inch floppy, and switch.
The Central Unit and the Tape Unit were filled with similar boards. On the left there is a pencil just for detecting the proportion!
Let's see what sort of programs we wrote! Simply said, all kinds. We wrote to the company all the necessary accounting and production-following programs (except financial). There was everything from a payment through the norms to the warehouse. It was good high school to find the solutions.
I personally have used the following programming languages:
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Cobol (a lot - 98% of the company's programs was written in this)