Texas, 1978. Robert was working at a cotton co-op running what may have been one of the world's earliest online auction systems. Farmers received punch cards representing their bales of cotton - occasionally complete with enough stray cotton fibres to jam the card readers - while buyers placed bids remotely using leased IBM 3270 terminals and acoustic coupler modems.
After an upgrade, the mainframe refused to come back properly. An IPL produced a corrupted device address before dropping the machine into a hard wait. Single-cycling the processor indicated that an UNPK (Unpack) instruction was producing the wrong output from perfectly good input. The instruction itself had effectively broken.
And yes, this episode contains a lot of old IBM hardware and mainframe terminology. We know. That's part of the fun.
Want even more info ? Read our show notes and related blog post related to this episode : https://blog.ithorrorstories.eu/episode-24-when-unpk-broke/
00:00 Introduction
00:43 Robert's Background
02:14 IBM DOS
03:27 Cotton Auction System
05:37 Online Auction
07:14 SNA Protocol
09:05 Hardware Issue
13:20 Debugging Unpack
17:13 IBM Fix
21:23 Conclusion
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