Old Computing

My first experience with computing was in my second year at uni, doing Architecture. I did a subject called 'systems analysis' wherein we learnt precious little about actual systems analysis, even though it would have been greatly useful for us, but rather learnt to program in BASIC on teletype terminals!! Ye gods, you exclaim, what are they?

This was in 1975, and the terminals hung off an ICL main frame. It was tedious work with the output coming line by line on the teletype output roll.

Some years later I worked in a government department that was experimenting with computers for tasks related to the production of architectural documents. There had been some experiments with developing CAD capability on a giant primitive cathode ray tube screen, but what did work was the semi-automated production of building specifications.

I worked with Barry Miller and John Temple-Watts (hi, if you're reading this) on the architectural side, and a bunch of programmers and systems people on the computing side; my desk (we didn't have 'work stations' in 1979) was with the computer people, next to a separate computer room, with false floor, computer smell and over-enthusiastic air-conditioning.

The machine was a Varian mini computer, the size of three or four full sized domestic refrigerators. The units included tape drives, a paper tape reader and the main processor and memory. There were a set of disk drives off to one side; I think about three, with 5mb removable disk packs with platters about 40cms in diameter.

In front of the refrigerators was the operator's console and a line printer near by. In a back room was a noisy machine called a decollator.

All input came on punched cards, punched by a team of four or five young female punch machine operators.

The way it worked was this.

An architect would fill in a long form to select the specification clauses that covered the materials and components to be used in a building. We would take the form and a set of cards would be punched then run in the Varian to produce a print out by selecting specification clauses from a clause bank, making a tape of the selected clauses and then sending to the line printer.

The architect would then edit the first run, and the punch operators would set about punching cards to make the changes.

It was noisy in the computer room with the line printer bashing out hundreds of pages of text, which then had to be run through the even more noisy decollator and sent to the architect for a second review.

Apart from having to load punched cards to get the work going, the various programs and data tapes had to be loaded too. This meant getting tape reels from the tape library and winding the tape onto the tape drive. The various programs had catchy names: CLINDU for clause list index update, SPRINT, for specification print, SPUPDA for specification update (that was my favourite).

The morning routine was to boot the Varian and off to work. Usually the paper tape boot ran successfully; but frequently it didn't and we had to punch a sort of pre-boot sequence into a unit for the purpose: a line of lights, with a line of buttons beneath, to be punched in a specific order.

One of the other staff in the unit also used the Varian, but to run a football pool! Yes, Ray Cannings, your secret is out. Malcolm Curry was a very helpful engineer in this unit.

After I'd spent 9 months here I returned to the drawing board.

My next encounter with computers was using an Alpha Micro to run a program called Vision, which was an early project scheduling package. Well, two packages. The first package assembled a list of tasks. Then one had to run another program to link the tasks into precedence order. It did print out a useable network, though. This unit also ran a program to produce project cash flows, using some of Bromilow's work that modeled cash flows by size and type of project. This was quite a useful and reasonably accurate.

Soon after I'd perfected using Vision on a large tertiary referral hospital project, for a clinical services block, we were given Apricot computers running Lotus 123. I and some others started using this for our project management; keeping track of work packages and responsibility assignments. Was really good, but my colleagues failed to see the beauty, and so an opportunity to bring some real efficiency was slightly missed.