Saturday, January 13, 2018

My First Data Migration - Terry Winter - Part 2

Click here to read part 1 of this blog.

The first day on the job, I was standing by the book room, which was just outside of the computer room. As noted in the previous post, the computer they were going to migrate to had 48 KB of RAM and a 10 MB hard drive, all fit into a chassis the size of a large fridge.

I watched my brother and his friend John carry the IBM PC in.  John had the PC, with the hard drive balanced on top, and my brother was carrying the monochrome monitor, keyboard and a power bar (no mouse, this was DOS, not Windows.)  This computer had more than 12 times the RAM and the same size hard drive, and they were carrying it in their arms!

To give you an idea what it would have looked like, here's a picture of my IBM PC XT. This one had the hard drive built in. In their case it was about half the size of the system unit, balanced on top.



They plugged it all in.  It needed one plug for the system unit, one for the hard drive (because it was external) and one for the monitor. When they turned it on, the hard drive sounded like an airplane motor starting.

The plan was to print a massive report of all the data to the Diablo, but instead of the Diablo, they would hook this into the IBM PC's serial I/O port.   This brought us to the first challenge:

The Diablo wanted the data to come to it at about 9600 baud (just under 1000 bytes per second).  The IBM PC's interrupt handler code for the serial port could barely handle 1200 baud on a good day. So they had to write an assembler routine to handle the serial I/O interrupts and replace the existing handler with this. This core routine was a critical piece of software for anyone wanting to do terminal emulation in future years on the IBM PC architecture, including all the clones that came out.

So they took the printer cable for the Diablo and had to rewire it a bit to connect to the IBM PC. It seems that pins 1 and 2 were used for send and receive, but you had to switch them at one of the ends, or you'd have the equivalent of someone holding an old phone receiver upside down, listening at the microphone and talking to the earphone.

They wrote a program on the PC to capture the data and write it to the hard drive.  I believe it was in assembler, but could have been in C.  Then they started with the surnames starting with the letter "A" and printed the report off of that 7 1/2 inch floppy.  They repeated this until they got to the letter "Z".

Then they ran through the data and organized it. They found all the places where escape codes were used to change direction and processed them specially.  Finally, they were ready for the "forward" part of the "store and forward" operation.

This was even trickier.  The Microdata's serial I/O handler was not interrupt driven the same way as the IBM PC.  The program had to be at a BASIC INPUT statement before you could send it data. Otherwise it would just echo a BEL character (your terminal would beep!)  What's more, even in input mode, if you sent two characters too quickly, you would lose the second one.  A human could type too fast for it, let alone another computer. In later years they implemented a type-ahead buffer, but at the time we were doing this conversion it wasn't an option.  The IBM PC could out-type any human, so the output program had to have some special logic.

We would send a character, then wait for the other end to echo what we sent.  As soon as we saw the echo, we'd start a delay of n milliseconds. I believe they parameterized that delay so they wouldn't have to change the assembler program each time.  When they sent a carriage return, you waited for the carriage return and linefeed to echo, then you put in a really long delay (almost a whole second as I recall it.)  Then you could get on with the next character.  This part took several days to complete and had to be restarted from time to time, when characters would fail to echo and the PC would stall, or other problems were encountered.

Finally, the data was all captured into a staging file on the Microdata.

Next post I'll talk about how we got that data into the target files and the data cleansing we had to do.

1 comment:

  1. Robert, do you remember all these details? Or have you written them down elsewhere? What a memory! It sounds so antiquated. You should write a software book. LOL! I'm so glad I took a picture of you with your first computer. I remember we had to move to an apartment which had 2 bedrooms. Not for a new baby, but for your new computer!

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