[u-u] The article I mentioned last night

[David Gilbert]

On 8/14/2015 11:40 AM, D'Arcy J.M. Cain wrote:
> On Fri, 14 Aug 2015 10:09:30 -0400
> arocker at Vex.Net wrote:
>> The whole "software-defined" thing has me puzzled. At some point, no
>> matter how they're arranged, bits have to slither down real pipes and
>> come to rest in something with two real states, be they magnetic,
>> capacitative, chemical, or gravitational. All the software in the
>> world can't get around that inconvenient truth.
> Not the same thing I suppose but I once proposed (might have been on
> April 1) a scheme where I would mail myself large files using UUCP and
> a bang path that caused it to go around the world and back to me.  When
> it came back my system would pack it up again.  So basically my files
> would be in constant travel and never sit on my own server other than
> temporarily in the spool.
>
> How's that for a cloud service?  ;->
>

Not exactly the same, again, but when in University, we got about 50
"credits" on the University's IBM 360 mainframe.  Our basic accounts had
barely a floppy of hard drive space and the credits were mostly meant to
be used for printing.  One particular "hole" was that you got
"unlimited" temporary hard drive space that lived as long as you were
logged in and unlimited 9600 BPI (ie: real to real 9-track tape) tape
storage.

When you entered a command to mount a tape, a real person fetched the
tape, spooled it up ... and after you unmounted the tape, removed it and
returned it to the rack.  That's right, we had real operators.

So my trick was to write the CMS equivalent of a "login" script which
allocated temporary disk, mounted, unpacked, unmounted my tapes in order
and a logout script that did the reverse.

Always makes me smile to think about it.  I think I had about 20 tapes
most of the time.