My First Computer | |
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Circa 1980.
It was a great computer. Actually there are two in this picture: an NCR 8250 on the left, and the much newer and updated NCR 8275 on the right. The 8250 featured 128K of memory and two 10MB drives, each with a removable 5MB platter. The 8275 retailed for around $150k and had a 30MB hard drive with a 15MB removable platter and was a marvel of engineering. The 30MB disk drive retailed at around $40k.
A few removable platters (we called them "disk packs") are shown sitting on top of the servers. They had a handle on top to make them easier to load in the computer. We usually stuffed a directory printout through the handle. That's the bit of paper you can see on the top of the disk packs. Every disk pack was identified by serial number and cross referenced to a client list. Although we had a nice cabinet for storing the packs, they did tend to pile up around the computer at times.
My company provided data processing services to many businesses within our region. Oh yeah, the bigger brown cabinet in the corner is only the air conditioner. Water cooled and with a big fan, it often confused visitors who thought it was part of the computer. That was one cool room. You only stayed in there as long as necessary. The real work was done on a terminal at your desk (the terminals you see in this picture were seldom used).
I'm trying to remember the specs, but we didn't pay much attention to that stuff back then. I know we only ran about a half dozen terminals on the 8275. A similar machine, which our local city used, ran many more, but their machine was built up with a lot more memory and disk. We were a data processing shop and rarely ran more than a few jobs at a time (the machine was faster that way). I think the 8275 had a whopping 128K of memory, a major upgrade from the 64K of the earlier 8250 sitting beside it.
I remember the results of performing a sort routine on a large data file. The disk drive head cylinder on the 8270 would make a loud hissing noise as it flew back and forth within it's large-diameter piston. The energy created by this activity caused enough vibration that, if the wheels were not locked on the cabinet, the entire computer would start to roll across the room.
Originally we used NCR 7200 data entry machines to capture data to cassette in what we called batches. We would then move the data cassette to the main computer for processing. Although we didn't know this at the time, the 7200 used a very early version of Microsoft Basic to control the machine, format the data entry screen and store data on cassettes. We later replaced the 7200's with on-line data terminals so we could capture data directly to the 8275 computer. This was a major programming achievement.
We didn't keep all of our data files on line. Client data was kept on removable "disk packs" that were loaded onto the computer when processing was required. We would load the client pack, read in the batch data from cassette (or later from batch files on the fixed disk), merge the data, sort and print. End of Job.
Of course we seldom turned these babies off. They required a lot of time and attention to power up. And upgrades to the operating system could take days to process, overnight as a minimum. You didn't want to do that too often and you were always careful to schedule these activities to allow for problems, like doing the whole thing over again. And restarting one of these processors because of an application problem? Forget about it.
Before we gave our 8275 computer back to NCR, it would randomly freeze and require that we jiggle the processor cards in the secondary card cage before restarting. They had a problem explaining that one. It made for exciting days when a client was expecting their work to be completed and we were restarting their job for the second or third time.
I do remember surprising a few of my friends who were heading out of town before dawn to begin their week-end hunting expedition. They passed me on their way out of town as I was returning home after a night of babysitting the computer through some important job. They were astonished to see the computer boy up and about at a time when real men (hunters) were the only traffic in town. They found it hard to believe that I had been up all night at the office.
I should have taken a picture of the internals of these machines. The processor boards were large and fit into a card cage. Most of the wiring on the boards used wire wrap terminals, chips were plugged into sockets, and very little was actually soldered directly to the boards.
There were probably better brands of computers than these at the time, but NCR technology was cheap. I have looked on official NCR web sites, but they don't seem to admit making these machines.
Ahh those were the days. Very few understood computers back then. You could tell people anything about a computer and they would believe you. Now I hesitate to even tell my car mechanic that I work with computers. Everyone wants to debate the merits of front-side-bus technology or whatever with me. I find that stuff boring. I just use computers to earn a living. The really interesting part of my business is problem solving. A company comes to me with a problem, and I deliver a solution. That's basically my business plan.
The cool thing about those good old days: the leasing costs were a fixed overhead; I think ours was around $10k a month. Our revenues were based on transaction volume, so once you billed enough to cover overhead you were in the gravy. The staffing costs were reasonable - my wife, Liselotte, was the fastest data entry clerk you ever saw. None of our employees could match her. She hired help when she needed it and also handled computer operations.
I wrote the programs and managed the systems side of things. I also provided a (weak) sales effort to find new customers. Some of our biggest customers walked in our door begging for help...so we helped. I thought that was 'sales'.
Oh yeah, here are the printers. They were cool drum printers that made an awesome noise when they were busy. When they ejected a blank page the paper went flying. The hard part was catching it! Static electricity was definitely your enemy in this room.
A drum printer like these use a large metal cylinder (drum) that spins vertically in front of the paper. The cylinder is as long as the paper is wide and contains a horizontal row of matching letters. As the cylinder spins the letters will line up with the print path of the paper.
A ribbon rotates horizontally between the paper and the cylinder. Behind the paper is a row of hammers that match the number of print positions available on a single line of paper.
If you wanted to print ABCD on the paper, the cylinder would rotate until the row of A's reached the print line and the print hammer in the first print position would hit the paper from behind, impressing the A character through the ribbon and on to the paper. The cylinder would continue to rotate until the next line of characters (the B's) would line up with the print line and the hammer in the second print position would hit the paper. Same thing for every character.
Normally the printer would chatter away randomly as various numbers and characters were printed. If a print line contained multiples of a character (for example, letter 'E') they would all print at once and make a louder sound. If you printed the same character across the entire line, for example all '*'s (stars'), you would hear a loud bang as the print hammers all smacked the paper at the same time. If you printed the alphabet in order, you would hear a zipping sound as each letter dropped into place.
When a page ejected from printing, or several blank pages were ejected, there was a problem catching the paper and controlling static. We kept a humidifier in the room year-round. Paper jams were annoying if you didn't set the paper feed properly.
This is more than you want to know, but these machines were a mechanical marvel and well worth the time to watch. If you like mechanical marvels. If you were listening to the sounds coming from the computer room you could guess the progress of your job quite accurately by listening to the printer. Print jobs for customer A/R statements sounded quite different than, say, a General Ledger report. A program listing would print a row of stars every time it found an error in my latest programming effort. A loud bang, as the stars were printed, would announce to everyone in the office that I had made another mistake. That's why I usually ran this stuff at night.
My favorite printing experience was returning to the office early one morning and discovering an entire box of paper had been printed with a repeated error message. Apparently there was a bug in the language compiler, it got stuck on some typo in the program that it was processing, and ran out of a full box of continuous form paper before it stopped to think about it. I arrived to find the computer politely asking me to please load more paper so that it could continue with it's important job of spending my Print & Ribbon budget.
Fortunately there are two sides to every piece of paper, so I loaded the whole mess back into the empty supply box (upside down) and used the stuff for printing out program listings. It wasn't hard to know which side was the good side. You just ignored the side with all of the stars printed on it.
All of this stuff was replaced by a desk top marvel called the Victor 9000; a microcomputer with a 10Meg disk drive and 128K of memory for around $10k. What a deal!
Oh yeah, I predicted the wimpy IBM PC, which came out at about the same time, didn't stand a chance against the Victor. Just look at the original specs for each of them and you will see why.
Of course technology focused people like myself have never been recognized for the sheer genius of our marketing prowess...oh yeah...the 'dot.com' boom/bust of 2000. Well that wasn't our fault was it? You were the ones handing out all the money to every propeller head in town!
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