computers, those were the days

[SmartWombat]

When a computer occupied two huge rooms, had a smoothed three-phase AC supply, and the CPU was 5 feet high and over 10 feet long spread across several cabinets.
Ours was an ICL1903T, with semiconductor store replacing the original magnetic core memory.
The operator's console is a 110baud teletype, and behind them is a row of EDS8 disk drives (8MB), next to the tape decks.
Foreground right is the and of an old ICT barrel printer, the newer ICL barrel printer is out of shot.
You can just see the control buttons of the punch card reader to the right of the operators.
It ran batch jobs with spooled card reader and line printer, as well as a multiuser terminal system supporting the college.
Not bad for 96Kwords of store!

[wfooshee]

So "teraflops" was probably not a term applied to this one as a performance measure?

[Franglais]

I never heard of a 3903. I started on a 1904. It didn't have disks, it had a magnetic drum.

I didn't find it very fun. We used to put in our COBOL programs for compilation on punch cards overnight and come in next morning to discover that due to a tiny error in the leading card the whole job had failed. Which meant waiting till the next evening for a new run.

[mattb]

Nice photo and history!

I never used punch cards, but did start out on DEC terminals and TeleTypes (to print that ascii porn when I was a kid - ooh baby!). I think the box behind it was a DEC PDP-11 series of some sort. Around the same time I was using a Commodore PET at school, saving my BASIC masterpieces to audio cassette.

Professionally the oldest beast I managed was a Sequent with 10 486sx CPUs in it from the early 90's. We ran COBOL (we called it SloBall) applications under Dynix. The disk drives were Swallow 5s which were 5mb each. One of my regular maintenance tasks was taking drives offline and running a realignment utility periodically as they would experience head drift over time. It ran on 3 phase power and was kind of scary to take apart due to the high current. The UPS was about the size of an office desk and the computer cabinet was about the size of a large upright freezer. It put out a lot of heat!

[Greg McCary]

Paul I had a Commodore VIC 20 and 64.

[Axle]

My very first computer was a Commodore CBM 8032, I bought it at a Garage Sale for 3$. I got it just before HS, and learned BASIC on it.

Of course my family had been using computers since 1987, but the CBM was my own computer. My iPhone had more storage and processing power.

[Don Schaeffer]

I had a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1 (4k memory) in 1979. I later enlarged it to 16k. I was able to program usefully in BASIC. I had a contract to keep track of a social agency's clientele from staff daily records and produce monthly summary report. All the data was recorded onto a cassette tape then fed back through for counting every month.

[SmartWombat]

Damn figners - yes a 1903T

We ran a similar batch system, Charles.

Using George II we had a virtual card reader and printer, so we could read in all the jobs in one session.
Then let the OS multitask its way through them all, reading from the virtual card reader, and writing to the virtual printer.
Finally run the despooler and print out the results of the runs.
It was on an hourly cycle, usually three of four trays of card jobs we'd gather form the input area and put back in pigeon holes for the users sorted by user ID.

The batch system needed a control card to specify the language and user ID, and all FORTRAN programs had a MASTER statement.
Mis-type that ans MSATER would trigger a huge number of compilation errors.


The 1903T was a few generations after the original 1903, and had the original 1904 features including multitasking executive and virtual addressing registers. But it was much slower than a 1904 despite having STTL logic.

Eventually we upgraded from EDS8 to EDS60 (second hand of course).

Before powering on (a process that took 15 minutes) there were two circuit boards that could be pulled from the processor cabinet and it had the peformance of a 1904 so we could run George III and we could run backup jobs for the county council.
I don't know how much ICL charged customers for not putting in those circuit boards at manufacture, and I never knew exactly what the engineer did ... but because we had the fast semiconductor store instead of core apparently they could do this trick and the machine actually worked.

[SmartWombat]

Our first microcomputer in college was an Altair 8800 with 8" floppy drive.
It booted in a similar way to the ICL, use the front panel data & address switches to key in a binary boot loader.
Formatting a floppy used a BASIC program, and took over 10 minutes.
Bill Gates' BASIC in ROM built-in, with extensions to run the Cromemco "dazzler" add-on board for colour graphics.
State of the art in those days!

I went from a Biology BSc 2nd year dropout to a job in the computer centre and never looked back.