[Winchester12g]

.....and when a new fangled 'laser printer' arrived at the office, well I thought I was working at NASA!

 

[Happy Harry]

What's all this talk of KB, MB, GB, TB, Laser printers and things. We managed perfectly well without them in the olden days.

My first employment was with STL at Harlow as a research assistant in 1965. STL (S*D the lot) was part of the STC (S*D the customers) organisation which was a British division of ITT (International Talking and Traveling) which I believe is now extinct. However, with STC as manufacturers of a cutting edge device called the STANTEC ZEBRA and being a research establishment we were able to have a large room specially prepared with powerful air conditioning to receive such an item. Harlow Town Council on hearing of these preparations became concerned that we were intending to keep unlicensed wild animals so we had to make the appropriate application and in due course were granted permission to house our STANTEC ZEBRA.

Once our ZEBRA had settled in we would feed it with copious amounts of punched paper tape which it would consider very rapidly at speeds of ten or so words per second and then use it's huge capacity brain made from ferrite cores by Spanish lacemakers who were skilled enough to connect 1024 of these to a board measuring only inches across. The ZEBRA had a teleprinter as a toilet into which, after much digestion of the punched paper tape, it would poop out much garbage that even our top Boffins had difficulty in interpreting. Aah! Those were the days.

Here is a link to a PDF of the original sales brochure of this wild animal s3data.computerhistory.org/brochures/stantec.zebra.1961.102646082.pdf

If anyone's interested of course.

I think my latest security handling is blocking the above link so you will probably have to type it into your browser yourself.

 

[Jim_S-V6_2004]

By Crikey, Harry!

Standard Telephone, yes. Stantec Zebra - No!

But Lyons Tea House's Leo is similar age, 195x... I'll try to find a pic...

Here we go, lucky! :

http://ta.mdx.ac.uk/leo/leo-computers/

I never worked on those, too young!

Luckily.

 

[Jim_S-V6_2004]

very similar Jim tape drives had horizontal vacuum chambers to tension tape we had four drives . Ours was a 1100 line per minute printer . Machine was then upgarded to An IBM 360/25 with some virtual memory and two partition operating system ( Background and Foreground). I worked at Eastern Computer Services part of the Geest group in Spalding and then in Peterborough

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Good stuff David.

I never saw those tapes, the 2401s were alongside 3420s (Phase Encoded) by the time I went to BA. Then we replaced them with Storage Tech 3600s (GCR - Group Coded Recording). All great fun. Then MagStar cartridge tape units.

We never forgot us roots cos they kept appearing in almost every IBM site.

The 360/65s were deinstalled in about 1981, I could fix those once I was shown how to run diags. One night I repaired a handful of I think memory driver cards and when our tech specialist arrived in the morning...

He broke and binned them! "We don't repair cards in IBM" he said, "we bin them! They can't be repaired successfully!"

Well, I just had, the very first ever! I was not amused even at 24!

"It's only cos you don't know how in IBM" I said and stormed off for a cuppa. There was stunned silence behind me. Boy was I miffed. We soon changed that policy. But he was a great bloke, always made me sit down for a coffee and think through problems, and that became a habit. So many problems in IBM systems were intermittent. Trileads and card contacts in the 370.

Memories we share perhaps?

What's the last system you worked with?

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[oscarsmate]

Our colleagues produced a few ICL computers for us, running CP/M. Anyone remember those?

.

Remember them well. I think an ex colleague still has one in his 'museum' in his loft.

After a failed career as an marine engineer started in 1981 working on Tandy TRS-80. Then worked for a company importing intertec supebrain, had to fit a transformer to work on 240v. Until one day one was wired the wrong way! Cheapo version with 1 x 256k floppy or for another £1k with 5mb hard drive.

Then started on Rair Black box (which became ICL) running either CP/M or MP/M. A few other machines running MMOST. Oh the joys of wiring up terminals via RS232 plugs and the vagaries.

And then Columbia machines as a IBM PC copy. I also had to look after a monstrosity with a 20mb 8" HD to support a word processing system called atp-80 written in MS-Basic. Again getting them to talk together via 232 wires.

Also supported Lex-11 word processing on DEC VAX and a few other systems for TELEX and FAX on DEC machines. Things improved with DEC NET!

Then on to the relatively sane world of Local Government putting PC and Novell networks in and integrating to the ICL mainframe over X25. Cheaper than ICL DRS kit.

Finally to healthcare, ran the first Electronic Prescription service trials 1998-2004 mainly around Hayling Island and Havant. Good fun.

Then went on to work for CSC and a few other companies on the modernisation of the NHS systems 2005- 2018. Worked on a lot of hospitals putting in health care systems and integrating to existing systems via HL7.

Then took VR last year into retirement Bliss after 51 years almost continuous work!

 

[Jim_S-V6_2004]

.....and when a new fangled 'laser printer' arrived at the office, well I thought I was working at NASA!

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Oh, yes! This one printed 20,000 lines per minute and was the size of a tube train and sounded like one as it started and sped up to full speed!: https://www.retromobe.com/2016/04/ibm-3800-laser-printer-1976.html

Quite a machine.

Later Fujitsu ones used cut A4 sheet and were only a little faster.

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[GeoffR]

My first computer was an Olivetti with 2MB or memory and a 40MB hard drive. It ran windows 3.1.
Today i would fill that hard drive 8 times over in about 1 second just by taking photographs (9 of them). We are creating, storing and shifting so much data that the vast majority of it never gets used, or deleted.

 

[Guest]

I've still got some unused 5¼" floppy discs.............

 

[Lost it]

I recall my first computer was an IBM AT thing with a huge 51/4 inch floppy disc drive, it had a 20 meg hard drive that took about a minute to spin up to speed, 1k of ram IIRC and ran DOS. I think it was an 8086? Probably worth a fortune now. Green screen too. I think that had a separate processor and Math Coprocessor... Of course I took the lid off to have a look.

I also remember you could have stood a car on the cases back then without them even creaking... I think the theory was that if they were paying upwards of two grand for the things, they should at least feel substantial because there was naff all inside them.

I could type faster than the keyboard buffer could keep up, and regularly had the thing bleeping as it struggled to catch up with the keyboard input.

And it used to refresh the screen at such a low speed that you could see it "writing" the lines on the screen... It would start at the top and slowly get to the bottom of the screen whenever I loaded Lotus Notes up. Doubt it would be able to connect to the interweb if I'm honest, if I connected mine to the token ring network it would sit for ages doing not much at all except warming the room.

I remember IBM OS/2 coming out and thinking it was a vast improvement on Windows 2...

But they were good days, I made a good living building IBM clones for a few years before Pentium 2 came along and spoiled it all with it's PS/2 compatible mother boards. First PC I built for myself had an AMD K5 200 processor and 8meg of ram, a huge 520mb hard drive and a 2 speed HP CD writer... Wow... Ran Windows 3.1 and wouldn't "see" the CD writer until I upgraded to Win 95... So it must have been circa 1995? Not that long ago then?

Even then I made a bit of money running Celeron chips faster than they were supposed to, when you could get a decent processor speed boost just by resetting the board clock speed to 100mhz rather than 66mhz.

Good times.

I was one of the first to buy a 1Ghz Athlon and treat it to 64 meg of ram. The power supply didn't have enough grunt to keep it running, it used to freeze and reset if I got anything going at a decent lick, right until it twigged as to why it was freezing. Clearly a 140 watt power supply wasn't adequate.

 

[Jim_S-V6_2004]

Atari?

Oric 1?

Commodore Pet was the first practical affordable personal computer, for word processing and spreadsheets, and database work as well as games of course. And we could write programmes for it reasonably easily.

Did anyone else have one?

.

 

[Happy Harry]

I had one of Sir Clive Sinclair's ZX 81's. A whole 1KB of memory as I remember. That certainly focused you on efficiency when it came to doing any programming for it. You could either buy it ready assembled or in kit form. I moved on to one of Sir Alan Sugars PCW's after that. A 256 model operating under CP/M. These were the first really useful machines for small business and domestic word processing and limited programming as well.

 

[Lost it]

I bought a ZX81 in kit form. Built it, connected it to the TV, turned it on and sat and stared at the flashing curser thinking "What the heck do I do now?"

Nothing much has changed if I'm honest...

 

[Happy Harry]

stared at the flashing curser thinking "What the heck do I do now?"

Nothing much has changed if I'm honest...

That happens to me with things like remote controls and mobile phones. My solution is to find a seven year old child to sort it out. But I think things have changed. Nowadays all you need is a five year old child.

 

[Spudgun!]

Did someone say ZX81? Here's mine!

 

[Spudgun!]

While I'm here. Here's my 'Speccy'.



I've also got a Spectrum +2B and a +3.

 

[Lost it]

I have a Commode 64 and an Atari 512. I think they still work....

 

[MarkFY]

I have a Commode 64 and an Atari 512. I think they still work....

Well I certainly hope the 'Commode' works

 

[Jim_S-V6_2004]

There was another early personal computer which came as a self-assembly kit but it was quite complex to assemble and had to be debugged too. I remember two of my systems engineer shiftmates bought them and both had weeks of problems from dry joints - NASCOM 1?

.

 

[Jim_S-V6_2004]

Well I certainly hope the 'Commode' works

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Yep, could cause quite a messy "dump" if not! "Logs" would be... Uhhh... Lumpy!

This should bring back memories, so.many people had one:

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