Post by Glen B Ogle on Apr 19, 2008 16:57:53 GMT
Following on from tigerlily's tales from the legal jungle (but nowhere near as good) I though I'd post a few of my memories of working in computing nearly 25 years ago.
Obviously the main thing looking back is just how much things have changed. I just avoided working with punch cards - by only a year at University though. When programming we used to have to submit the job then go away for an hour or so before getting the print out. It tended to teach good programming very quickly - you made sure everything was right first time if possible. Now I tend to run the program and let the computer tell me what's wrong!
In my first IT job I ran two DEC VAX systems. One of these had approximately 100 users, mainly entering research data. This wasn't the most powerful of machines, but it had just been upgraded to 4Mb of memory, with 2 456Mb disk drives. The other VAX had a whopping 8Mb of memory and 5 456Mb drives. These disk drives (known as Winchesters) were actually a revelation - prior to this they had used 300Mb removable disk packs (we still did, but only for backups).
As there were no CDs in those days everything was loaded either from tape (those tape devices you saw on telly with the loops of tape going up and down weren't too far from the truth) or from 8" floppy disks. Loading over 50 of these in one day for an operating system upgrade was not the most stimulating job.
If I recall correctly, memory cards were about £1,000, with a whole 1Mb on each one. The Winchester disks were in excess of £20,000 each. To put this in perspective the mini laptop (which cost a few hundred pounds) I'm typing this on has 2Gb of memory and 86Gb of disk drive - to achieve the same 25 years ago would have cost somewhere around 6 million pounds.
The very first IBM PCs and the like were just starting to appear. These were a revelation compared to the previous 8-bit PCs - some of them had 256kB of memory - 4 times what their predecessors had! As a result we were starting to get word processing programs and spreadsheets. Of course as I was a Civil Servant anything I typed on the word processor had to be printed out and sent to the typing pool to be redone on a typewriter.
For home computing I went through a couple of Sinclair products (a ZX81 and a Spectrum) then moved on to a BBC Micro. I even had a 5 1/4" floppy disk drive for the latter - much better than cassette tapes.
Of course there was no internet, but we did have email. BT had a system called Prestel which you could dial in with a 1200/75 modem (my very slow broadband connection is over 1,000 times faster). The speed didn't really matter as everything was text and graphic characters anyway. If I wanted to send an email to one of my colleagues who was working at Newcastle Uni I would dial in to a modem at work in Watford, then make a connection by something called PSS to JANET (the Joint Academic Network). There was a connection from this to NUMAC (the Newcastle & Durham Universities network) and hence on to the VAX my friend used. I had to sign on to this computer to then send the email. It's a lot easier now!
If I haven't already bored everyone I might post some memories of computer support another time - they do include fires, coffee and such like.
Glen
Obviously the main thing looking back is just how much things have changed. I just avoided working with punch cards - by only a year at University though. When programming we used to have to submit the job then go away for an hour or so before getting the print out. It tended to teach good programming very quickly - you made sure everything was right first time if possible. Now I tend to run the program and let the computer tell me what's wrong!
In my first IT job I ran two DEC VAX systems. One of these had approximately 100 users, mainly entering research data. This wasn't the most powerful of machines, but it had just been upgraded to 4Mb of memory, with 2 456Mb disk drives. The other VAX had a whopping 8Mb of memory and 5 456Mb drives. These disk drives (known as Winchesters) were actually a revelation - prior to this they had used 300Mb removable disk packs (we still did, but only for backups).
As there were no CDs in those days everything was loaded either from tape (those tape devices you saw on telly with the loops of tape going up and down weren't too far from the truth) or from 8" floppy disks. Loading over 50 of these in one day for an operating system upgrade was not the most stimulating job.
If I recall correctly, memory cards were about £1,000, with a whole 1Mb on each one. The Winchester disks were in excess of £20,000 each. To put this in perspective the mini laptop (which cost a few hundred pounds) I'm typing this on has 2Gb of memory and 86Gb of disk drive - to achieve the same 25 years ago would have cost somewhere around 6 million pounds.
The very first IBM PCs and the like were just starting to appear. These were a revelation compared to the previous 8-bit PCs - some of them had 256kB of memory - 4 times what their predecessors had! As a result we were starting to get word processing programs and spreadsheets. Of course as I was a Civil Servant anything I typed on the word processor had to be printed out and sent to the typing pool to be redone on a typewriter.
For home computing I went through a couple of Sinclair products (a ZX81 and a Spectrum) then moved on to a BBC Micro. I even had a 5 1/4" floppy disk drive for the latter - much better than cassette tapes.
Of course there was no internet, but we did have email. BT had a system called Prestel which you could dial in with a 1200/75 modem (my very slow broadband connection is over 1,000 times faster). The speed didn't really matter as everything was text and graphic characters anyway. If I wanted to send an email to one of my colleagues who was working at Newcastle Uni I would dial in to a modem at work in Watford, then make a connection by something called PSS to JANET (the Joint Academic Network). There was a connection from this to NUMAC (the Newcastle & Durham Universities network) and hence on to the VAX my friend used. I had to sign on to this computer to then send the email. It's a lot easier now!
If I haven't already bored everyone I might post some memories of computer support another time - they do include fires, coffee and such like.
Glen