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From: mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor)
Newsgroups: net.social
Subject: Re: My first time
Message-ID: <339@dciem.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 31-Aug-83 16:59:58 EDT
Article-I.D.: dciem.339
Posted: Wed Aug 31 16:59:58 1983
Date-Received: Thu, 1-Sep-83 03:12:47 EDT
References: <754@hou5e.UUCP>
Organization: D.C.I.E.M, Toronto, Canada
Lines: 35

I haven't figured out why this set of reminiscences is in net.social,
but anyway ...

My first computer was a Ferranti Mark I, otherwise known as FERUT
(Ferranti University of Toronto), which was the first computer bought
by U of T (They had one a-building in the EE department before that).
It had a bigger air-conditioning room than computer space. The cold
wind blew through 2 big bays of vacuum tubes (about 3000 of them if
I remember rightly) that had to be checked and replaced regularly.
Fast storage was on electostatic storage tubes, 65 x 65 bits per tube
(I think 4 such tubes) and the big backup storage was a drum of
maybe 1K 65-bit words (my memory is very hazy about the drum). I spent
an undergraduate summer as assistant maintenance technician on that
machine, and learned to program it from Christopher Strachey,
who wrote a checkers-playing program for it in machine code.
Assembly language hadn't been invented then, so you had commands like
:T/V
(I think that made the loudspeaker give a hoot). My first program
was Good King Wenceslas, which was made by repeating a loop of
such clicks on the loudspeaker at rate appropriate to the notes
you wanted to achieve (roughly; this was a millisecond computer,
not microsecond).
At one time, we had a request from somebody to give her 50 consecutive
hours of up-time so she could invert a big (10 x 10?) matrix. We retubed
the whole thing and burned in the new tubes, and she got her 50 hours.

The whole thing was a lot of fun. Computers got much more boring when
we went to such things as the Royal McBee LGP-30, with its 4K drum
memory, although there was some fun trying to locate things on the
drum so that the instruction was picked up and interpreted just as the
drum got around to where you had put its operand.

Who needs C!?!

Martin Taylor