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My first encounter with a computer was a
bus
which came from Manchester University in my last year at secondary school, 1971,
at Nelson Grammar School. We were given a guided tour as part of our Science lessons.
We were shown round the bus which was filled with what looked like metal filing cabinets on each side and a lot of whirring noises. It was hot. We were told the computer had 4k (I think) of Mercury Delay Line storage. The computer was doing simple calculations such as 2+2=4 and printing them out on a teletype. During the demonstration the computer developed a fault and stopped and the chap giving the talk looked at the error message and then thought for a moment. I got the impression that he was working out which part of the computer had failed. Then he pointed to one of the filing cabinets towards the front and to the right. "Hmmm that should be about there" he said. He walked over to it and kicked it with his foot. The computer sprang back into life! My first encounter with coding was in FORTRAN IV on an ICL 1906A with the George III operating system at Nottingham University the same year 1971. It was the norm to use Roman numerals for the George III operating system in the same way as FORTRAN IV. When I went to Nottingham University, to do Chemistry and Physics, we wrote programs on a FORTRAN coding form which is squared paper similar to graph paper to start with and then transferred the program to punched cards and submitted the deck to the computer for an overnight batch run. The data for the program was entered in the same way, on punched cards. These were submitted for an overnight batch run. The output was on music ruled computer paper which we got the next day. What was really frustrating was a compile error which needed to be corrected and re-submitted the next day - we only got one run per night. |
