State Bank Victoria | wisefaq.com

Knowing what you’re actually getting.

It was the late 1980’s.

My employer at the time ran two data centres in Melbourne. There was the production site in the Melbourne CBD, and the backup site at Clayton. They were linked together with data links provided by Telecom Australia.

The disaster recovery planners thought that wasn’t redundant enough. And since [...]

The mighty IBM 3800

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 [...]

Everything goes in circles: Cash Dye Bombs

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 [...]

“They don’t know who you are, just hang up.”

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 Blinkenlights were so pretty.

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 [...]

People used to say it sounded like a machine gun …

… 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.

[...]

Why we ran the biggest ICL shop in the Southern Hemisphere.

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 [...]

“No-Lone Zone” at State Bank Victoria

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 [...]

“What’s this ZNET command script do then?”

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 [...]

Wrong guesses are COSTLY!

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.