My (computer) history

1971

My first recollection of an interest in computers was probably 1971 when I was 14.  The CEGB (Central Electricity Generating Board, now National Grid) had an open day at Roseneath, their local office in Bramhall Park which was about a mile from my home.  A little site called bygone days has gathered together some information and recollections on CEGB.  A recollection from Len Simpson mentions that there were a couple of open days after the new control room was opened.

As an aside my sister was at school with Isobel Plevin, whose father Don was a manager at Roseneath, and Annettes father, Roy, who also worked at the CEGB in the National Control Centre used to go up to visit Don Plevin.  In addition the bygone-days website has articles by Roy Lewis and his colleague Tony Malins.

I remember that we walked around the Control room, which was very impressive.  I don't know whether we saw a computer but there was a board describing  a computer (memory) as having a lot of pigeon holes for information, which sounded strange.

I came away from the visit with a freebie, which was a totally incomprehensible book of flowcharts relating to the computers application.  I used to look at them to try to understand how it might work.

Following the visit I must have expressed an interest in computers.  My fathers company used to receive Computing and Computer Weekly newspapers but I think no-one read them.  My father used to bring them home for me and I regularly read through them and saved old copies even though they didn't mean much.  I read a lot about the mainframe manufacturers of the day, IBM. ICL, Sperry Univac, Burroughs.  I recall lots of discussions on ICL 1906 computers being installed by councils and government bodies.

1974

My first interaction with computers came at school, in 1974 I think.  I attended Kings School, Macclesfield and studied Maths and Physics  in the sixth form.  The local Technical College had a teletype terminal with a remote telephone link to a mainframe at Manchester University.  One afternoon a week, for a term, we went to the college to learn Basic programming and to use the teletype.

I enjoyed the sessions immensely and wrote a few programs.  I recall a program which generated simple poems was great fun and impressed the teachers.

We "wrote" programs at an "offline" teletype terminal and saved them on the attached paper tape machine.  We then  went to the "online" teletype and inserted the tape so that it could be read in.  This loaded the program to the computer in Manchester.  Running the program caused the results, or an error message, to be printed on the teletype.  You would then tear of the paper and handover the terminal to the next person.  If there was an error, you amended your paper tape and waited in the queue to re-run your program.  It seemed wonderful.

 

1975

The school was offered a place on a residential computer course in the 1974/5 Christmas holidays.  As I was interested in computers I was lucky enough to be selected to attend.  The course was held at Eton College which was lucky enough to have its own computer, an Elliot 903

I am not sure what programming language we used, it may have been Algol or Fortran.  It was a small computer with no long-term storage.  Again we wrote programs using a teletype and saved them on paper type.  As the computer didn't have permanent storage or much memory it was necessary to load the compiler into the computer on a tape, then load your program tape and compile.  The output was another paper tape which you loaded into the computer (overwriting the compiler) and ran the program.  Program output was printed on a teletype.

Unfortunately I dont recall details of programs I produced.