Dear Policemen, I am God

bruce · Post by **bruce** » Fri Nov 15, 2002 3:55 am

Tonight I made a mainframe my bitch.

There's nothing particularly unusual about that, of course. It's what I do for a living.

But this was special. And I bet I'm the first person ever, in the history of the Entire Fucking Universe, to do it.

Warning: it's like 500K, and it's not actually all that exciting.

http://www.fsf.net/~adam/Pitfall-on-390-desktop.png

Looks pretty much like a screenshot of a Linux box running Pitfall on Stella, right? And that's what it is.

It's just that, in the top window, where you can see

h2:~ # uname -a
Linux h2 2.4.7-timer-SMP #1 SMP Thu Oct 17 14:21:24 CDT 2002 s390 unknown

Well, that tells you that it's running on a System/390.

To all of you, I say,

Heh.

Bruce

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Fri Nov 15, 2002 4:08 am

Nice try, but the screen grab there OBVIOUSLY says "Copyright 1982," which means that... wait, I got distracted writing this.

You are logging in from 192.168.1.4? Do you have a System/390 at your house or something? I didn't think that corporations (or schools) set their networks up this way. How did you do that? What's going on here? How is this possible? Who are you people?

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Fri Nov 15, 2002 4:09 am

(Also, shit, I forgot to respond to that mail that you sent me because I pumped it up and got a very tiny amount of real work done today. But while I could verify that the guy was dead-on with his 2600 stuff, it's tougher for the NES because there were SO many garbage and horribly mistranslated games that came out for it. But I trust the author regardless. Heh.)

bruce · Post by **bruce** » Fri Nov 15, 2002 12:12 pm

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:Nice try, but the screen grab there OBVIOUSLY says "Copyright 1982," which means that... wait, I got distracted writing this.

You are logging in from 192.168.1.4? Do you have a System/390 at your house or something? I didn't think that corporations (or schools) set their networks up this way. How did you do that? What's going on here? How is this possible? Who are you people?

Actually, I have two S/390s at my house, but neither one is currently live because I've wheeled them out until the floor gets replaced (December 16). However, that particular S/390 is in Texas; it's Dave Jones' H70 (well, really, it's IBM's, but it's on loan to Dave).

The H70, and the Integrated Server I have, are each about the size of big dorm fridges. The IS weighs about 600 lbs, and I think the H70 weighs a bit more. My *other* mainframe is a plain-old PC Server 325 with a PCI P/390 card in it, and only weighs about 50 lbs. The P/390 is 4-5 MIPs; the IS is 7-8, and the H70 is about 120 MIPs.

Nice catch on the RFC1918 private address. Yes, this is on our VPN, and all of 192.168 is mapped to addresses on our VPN. My machines are at the bottom end of the range; Texas is 192.168.128-132.

Bruce