Laser printers use two types of fusion to fuse toner to paper, hot fusion, and cold fusion.

I’ve only seen cold fusion used once.  StorageTek used to make mainframe printers with cold fusion technology.  You’d take paper off the printer, and it would be icy cold.  Cold enough to burn you.

On the other hand, the first commercial laser printer, the IBM 3800 used hot fusion.

I had the privilege of working with one of those beasts.  The things I remember about them:

• Speed.  they were capable of printing 20,040 lines per minute.
• Keeping them filled with paper was a constant chore.
  IBM claimed they could produce 1.7 miles of paper every hour.  I’d believe it.
• Toner.  They used 5 litre (guessimate) bins, and we’d go though 1.5 bins on an eight hour shift.
  In comparison, the StorageTek had a toner hopper.  You’d pour toner into the hopper, and then watch the cloud of toner form above you.
• At the backup site, the IBM 3800 generated so much heat, it would trigger the fire alarm.
  The root cause?  Don’t put a big printer in a small room.
  The fix?  We’d leave the computer room doors open when we ran it.

Back when I was a spotty faced bank teller, banks in Australia had stopped using cash dye bombs.

“Spoil the prize, and you spoil the crime.” was the theory with dye bombs.

How cash dye bombs were used was fairly simple:

• bank robber demands the cash from the bank teller.
• teller scoops cash out of cash draw, along with dye bomb, which has automatically armed; into the robbers bag.
• robber runs out the door with the loot.
• dye bomb explodes in robbers bag, denying the robber the cash prize.

That’s what happened in a robbery.

But during a normal day, bank tellers were accidently arming the dye bombs.  Which would then explode, covering the bank’s cash, and possibly the teller, in indelible dye.

This would leave the cash unusable.

The bank’s would then ship the “faulty” bank notes along to the Reserve Bank of Australia for replacement.

The Reserve Bank eventually had enough of these accidental discharges, and said “Enough.  We’ll not accept dye covered notes for replacement.”

Which killed the use of dye bombs.

Proving everything goes in circles, I was reading the Reserve Bank’s Annual Report 2009, and see that the Reserve Bank is once-again accepted dye-stained notes.

What next?  The re-arming of Bank Managers?

Banks place a whole lot of responsibility on their tellers, to balance or “slicker” their cash draws at the end of the night.

And pressure.

No one goes home until every dollar is accounted for, or ultimately written off.  Talk about peer pressure.

I worked as a bank teller before I got into the IT game.  One night, over a beer after work, Ashley Brown* was telling the story about how he was $100 short.

“We balanced up, and found the cash draw was $100 short.”
(clearly Ashley overpaid someone, it happens).
As we were going though the receipts, we got a phone call..

‘G’day, I was overpaid $100’

Ashley was overjoyed that the money had been found, and was in the midst of asking the customer when he could return it, when he heard in the background of the telephone call.

‘What the f&*k are you doing.  They don’t know who you are, just hang up.’

CLUNK!

* Ashley was a high-flier.  Last I heard of him was that he’d transferred to the bank’s Internal Audit section.  Wouldn’t be surprised if he’s running the place now.

I had to descend one level, to check out one of our systems.

I could see though the access door window, that the lights on the whole floor were out.

Swiped my access card and swung the door open.

No strange sounds.  Certainly no smoke or fire.

Out onto the ICL Mainframe floor I ventured.

One of the prettiest sites you can see in IT, are all the blinking lights, from the hundreds of modems, hubs, switches, and routers; flashing off and on.

On any Friday and Saturday night, you’d find the hard working ICL Mainframe Operators of the State Bank Victoria IT branch, having a snooze.

In their sleeping bags.

Bank branch processing had finished for the week, and so they’d switch the lights out and have a sleep.

… when it starts to print.

If you click on the video, you’d see that they would be wrong.

Impact, or more accurately, band printers, have a sound all of their own.  Click on the Youtube video to see what I mean.

In the video, you can see the “type” on the print band.

Two things to know about these printers.

1. They have the sound cover off the printer in the video, so it’s LOUD.
2. Sound cover off = slow speed
   Sound cover on = high speed (2000 lines per minute)

State Bank Victoria used their 4245(?) band printer, to log all the ATM/EFTPOS between it, and all the other State Banks.

It was part of a system called State Bank Reciprocity.  It was kept rather busy.

State Bank Victoria (SBV) used to run IBM & ICL Mainframes.

The IBM Mainframes were a 3084, 3090-600J, System 36 & 4341.  The main processing was performed on the 3090.  The ICL’s were Series 39’s.

The IBM’s and ICL’s lived on different floors @ 330 Spencer Street.1

Now the official word as to why we had the biggest ICL Mainframe complex in the Southern Hemisphere, was this:

IBM Mainframes are good for batch processing.  ICL Mainframes are better at online transactional processing (ie. bank branch transaction processing).

The unofficial, or as I like to say, real reason was rumoured to be this:

One night, the ICL On-site Engineer2 was on the IBM floor, and noticed the ICL “J” scheduler program running on one of the IBM 4341 mainframes.  He reported this to ICL Management.  An SBV programmer had ported the “J” scheduler to the IBM Mainframe.  Clever bit of programming it seems.

“Discussions” occurred between SBV IT & ICL Management.

Costly legal action avoided, and SBV became the largest ICL Mainframe operator in the Southern Hemisphere.

1.  The Mainframe floor was derisively called “Heaven” by the SBV ICL Mainframe Operators, as the IBM floor was one floor above them.
2.  Trivia: the ICL On-site Engineer used to have an ICL Telecom Australia ComputerPhone computer in his office.  Only time I ever saw one.

The first mainframe I ever IML’d was the IBM 4341.  The 4341 was released in 1979.  Our 4341 was superseded by the 3090-600J.  IBM had released the 3090 family in 1985.

Superseded as the 4341 was, we still used it for one production job.

FarmBank PINs and TANs.

A PIN is something you already know about, as you use one when you use an Automatic Teller Machine.  A TAN on the other hand, you might not have heard of.  A TAN was a Transaction Authorisation Number.  Each FarmBank transaction required a TAN.  We issued a PIN; and TANs, when customers requested them.

Graziers were the target customers for FarmBank.  It allowed them to check their bank accounts from the comfort of their farm house.  FarmBank was gatewayed off from the main Telecom Australia Viatel system.  Viatel was a forerunner to the internet for most online users in Australia.

Now FarmBank PINs and TANs printing was considered highly sensitive, and only trusted staff were allowed to do it.

But mistakes happen.  Sometimes the PINs and TANs would be printed on blank paper stock, which we’d then have to shred.

Shred.

Except on one afternoon shift.  The supervisor took the printout, and threw it straight into the waste bin.
Just as the Data Centre Manager strolled past, doing the MBWA thing.  The supervisor was hauled over the coals, and PIN/TAN printing became a two-person operation aka “No-Lone Zone”.

One of the functions of the Network Operations Group had was managing the IBM Mainframe network.  Let’s say 2,500 terminals in all.

Now, back in those days, there was a 2% training levy that employers were required to spend on their employees.  So our management thought

We could send the Network Operations team to learn NetMaster.

NetMaster, later known as Solve:NetMaster, is a product which allows you to manage IBM Mainframe Networks.  Sure YOU CAN manage the network from a System Console (SysCon), but NetMaster makes it easier to do.

The other thing NetMaster could let you do is string commands into a batch file, so you could do complex network tasks.  Very useful in the right hands.

Enter the Newly Trained Operator, keen to see what all these scripts in front of him could do.  So, one by one, he ran them.  Everything went well until he reached Z.

Specifically the ZNET script.

Newly Trained Operator entered
ZNET
and pressed ENTER.

The console screens filled with errors, the 30 transaction log printers all started up at the same time, and the phones started ring.

Some clever Systems Programmer created ZNET to do a “Z NET, CANCEL”.  The reasons for doing so are lost in time.
Z NET, CANCEL forces the network to shutdown RIGHT NOW.  Kind of like unplugging your computer from the wall socket, without turning it off first.

The cost?  Whole branch banking and ATM network fell over, costing over $1 million and 2 hours downtime.

The following day?  Security permissions were applied to the NetMaster scripts.

This is at least 20 years old, and is as valid now, as it was back then.  Our training folks used to show it up on the overhead projector before any training course kicked off.

I suspect the artwork is by Hank Ketcham, but I don’t know.

The Wyse 286 PC (model WY-2108 for the curious) used to have an LCD display on the front panel.  You could write messages to it using a MS-DOS based utility.  In theory, you could use it to display messages when something failed.  But, I always wondered, how could you do that when something failed?

No, I don’t know either.

Some junior computer operators, who should have known better, used to write *naughty* words, which would greatly annoy Kathy the Supervisor.

The PicoLCD display, I fear, is headed for the same fate.  I’m yet to be convinced of it’s usefulness.  If it had a Linux driver, it WOULD be useful for my proxy box.

But if I had one right now, it would sit with the other 7 crap IT products I shouldn’t have brought, as the Linux support is poor.

The Wyse PC picture is courtesy of Mike’s Computer Museum and it is a Wyse WY-2116i PC
(looks the same as the WY-2108, except for the LCD panel).

Our Wyse 286, when not displaying *naughty* words, was used for creating system availability reports, with the MultiMate word processor.