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SW Saskatchewan | Back in the 60's the hot modeling technique was linear programming - and matrix inversion on a Friden desk calculator was both an exercise in frustration and the ability to marvel at the apex of mechanical perfection. When we got an electric calculator in the grad student office it was nearly the size of the Friden, every bit as expensive but could multiply and divide without having a service man in on a daily basis. Pen and pencil was still required- no such thing as memory registers then.
Attended a student conference in 1965 at Guelph OAC and their pride and joy was the computer they used for the Ontario DHIA. Don't know anything about it except it was programmed via changing a wired circuit board the size of a large cookie sheet. No printed circuit, every logic circuit was a soldered connection!
Back at Saskatoon that year our class got to tour the brand new Computer installation- an IBM 1620 that took up the third floor of one wing of the Engineering building and had 16k ram.
Within a few years every graduate student on campus was doing correlations of every conceivable factor with the number of sunspots in february. An awful lot of of poor science was conducted in that day but gained instant credibility because the R squared was calculated on a computer. But the new IBM 360 could crank them out in seconds.
The old card punch churned out either program cards or data cards. All my experience was with Fortran IV and status was getting a locker in the Computer sci building to store your "decks". Once your programming was finalized, the "source" deck would be put through the compiler and a machine language "object" deck would be printed that would run the program several times faster. An object deck could be rebuilt after shuffling but no such luck with the object deck.
If the research grant was particularly huge, you could get your program and data stored on Magnetic tape and a program run would have the operator mount the required tape on a drive. Disks were also available, much faster and also more costly to use. Computer time was in high demand and priority was given to shorter run time programs, thus if you could shave a minute off your run time, your position moved up in the queue and you could probably make an additional run in a day.
The feature of a computer centre that people can't comprehend today is the huge staff that was required to run the units. The status of the various technicians and the almost godlike position they occupied in the university structure.
The developers of the personal computer made us all better citizens- the mystery of the computer and the power of the Priests that served them was stripped away and we had the power to say "Bull" if anyone tried to pull the old authority trick. | |
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Computers, past and present
