Today was bank holiday Monday, the time in the office was spent clearing stuff from the computer room and disconnecting the last of the servers. They will be scrapped over the next couple of weeks, as we’ll be moving to new offices before the end of May. We’ll be in a large building with the business users, the building is laid out as a call center, where even the systems admins don’t have drawer space. In terms of days at work, this one was quite nostalgic, there were some cupboards to clear out in the computer room. They had all sorts of interesting goodies in them, there were PDU’s and Channel Adapters for the old ICL 2966 system. There were cables to go with them, there was the PUMA log book from ICL customer care. As I quickly scanned through it I noticed that the engineer, Mr Thompson had been the engineer for a number of years. That Mr. Bennet had been the ASM and that the site contact had been Mr. O’Hair, they had all been associated with site number 32405. There was a sheet of paper that told me what should have happened on the last day, just to cheer everyone up here is how it went.
- Ensure the 2966 system is closed and the dual 3980 is NCLOB.
- Dismount tapes from decks, clear printers, put all EDS 200 drives into manual, switch off FDS 640 at drives.
- Switch off all device circuit breakers, on PDU A, and all apart from 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 11b, 17a, 17c, 18a, 18c, 21a, 22a, 22b, 22s, 23c, 27b, 28a on PDU B (Red Labels).
- Press “STOP” button for PDU A, right hand group of buttons.
- Press alternator “STOP” button for PDU A, left hand group of buttons.
- Wait for foltage readings on PDUA to drop to zero and check that “PHASE” indicators are not lit, Move main isolator handle to “OFF” position.
- DO NOT, DO NOT, SWITCH PDU B MAIN ISOLATOR to OFF’
- Finally check that all indicator lights are off on PDU A.
I finished most of the stuff that I wanted to do, I didn’t have to do any thing on the list above. All I had to do when I left the computer room was close the door and turn the lights off as I left, bit of a change from the above!
So the computer room is now silent and I have had good look round, there are still some bits of kit lying around but they are all switched off. Changed days right enough, ten years ago you couldn’t hear yourself think in the computer room. Now it’s almost totally silent in there, I will just have to spend an other day in the room to transport it all to the skip.
We kept that site number until the very end in Jan 2009 – but not, unfortunately, M. Thompson or R. O’Hair. Since the dual 3980 was merely NCLOB (****_CLOSE_OF_BUSINESS – this auto-answered prompts when Ops. staff went home, thus allowing overnight processing to continue), this must have been the last day of the 2966 – early 1990’s? The 3980 underwent several transformations between then and 2009 when, finally, after the final app. was migrated to AIX, the ICL/Fujitsu hardware was put to rest. Well, sort of – ‘cos it’s de-commisioning was swiftly followed by a “Disaster Recovery” operation at Warwick to recover a corrupted file!! Thought I’d record a little history and where better ……?
I’d like to think that all this was long before the Muppet Show started when we had interesting project work and intelligent users???!! 😉
So someone could work out where the blog is based then, here was me thinking that it would be hard to trace.