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The beginning of computers – Daryl Hopper

I wrote the following story about twenty years ago when I was a computer operator. It starts in 1968 when I began in the computer world, such as it was back then. The story goes up to the early 1990’s when I quit. I will continue from there and try to bring it up to date. I hope you will enjoy it.

In the Beginning

The first computer was invented in 1822, but I started a little later. Actually, computers have been progressing faster and faster since then. The first generation (circa 1940’s and 50’s) were the tube and wire type, they had 18,000 tubes, 500 miles of wire and took up a half of a football field. They could do one transaction every three seconds, and you thought your computer was slow! You could not program them and they only had one kilobyte that is one thousand characters of storage. During the 1950’s and 60’s there was one person that was instrumental in bringing the computer into the next several generations. Her name was Grace Murray Hopper (1906-1992), I don’t know if she was a relative or not, probably not. She was in the United States Navy and retired as the first woman Rear Admiral. She invented the compiler, which translates basic English into machine language or the binary system. Now computers could be programmed for several different things from decoding messages to commercial business transactions. She was a fascinating person, if you want to find out more about her just search for ‘Grace Murray Hopper’ and you will find many sites with her biography etc.

The IBM 360 Years

That is enough history, let’s talk about me. Lol. When I started Computer College in 1968 we learned about the punch card and how to program the unit record machines by wiring the control panels. Unit record machines were machines that sorted, collated and gang punched the computer cards preparing them for input to the main computer or mainframe. When I graduated my first job was running some of these unit record machines. After a few boring weeks I was promoted to computer operator, wow, NASA here I come! Well, not really. The first computer I worked with was the IBM-30. The CPU was the size of a one-ton van. It had lots of lights and buttons. When it wanted attention, say when a job would pause until we mounted a tape, it would ring its fire bell. Needless to say we had to bring several pairs of shorts to work. Lol. We communicated with it via a ball typewriter. The commands were simple, eg. To start a ‘job’ we would say ‘START’, not exactly rocket science. We took the thousands of punch cards from those poor guys in unit record and fed them, hand full by hand full, into the card reader. The computer would then, if everything went well, start processing the ‘job’. DOS was a new thing, nothing like the DOS of later P.C.s. Before DOS we had TOS… Tape Operating System. We had to put the ‘supervisor tape’ on the tape drive, dial in the address of the tape drive on the CPU and hit ‘load’ on the console to start the job running. Very seldom a job would run from beginning to end without a problem. We would have to fix a card jam or the JCL (job control language) or get a programmer to fix the program usually at 4 am. I later was promoted to programmer at a different company. This meant I got most of the problems to fix at 4 am… not fun. Programming the mainframes of the day took a lot of patience and time. They only had 64k. Megabytes were unheard of yet. We wrote a program, usually in COBOL, on coded sheets of paper, several pages long. Then we submitted it to the keypunch department. They would keypunch the written instructions onto punch cards. We would write the Job Control that told the computer what to do with the compiled program. All this would take a day. Then we would submit the compile to the computer to run, usually overnight. The next day we would get our compile and the printout to debug. This would go on until the compiled program was perfect. Then we would finally catalog it, which meant load it into storage. We had to know how to read core dumps in order to find room for the programs and fix any problems in the programs. A core dump was the actual data and program instructions in binary form or machine language. We would add and subtract in hexadecimal, a number system based on 16 not 10 eg. 0123456789ABCDEF. So 5+C=11, not eleven but one one or 0011 in binary machine language. The fun part, when I was an operator, was that the machines were so slow that we had lots of time on our hands and we were young. The machines ran 24/7 and so did we. So, we would run a long job that would take at least three hours on the night shift, then go out and party. We took turns running back to change a tape or whatever needed to be done. By morning the jobs would be finished, the reports printed and distributed, and the boss would think we worked hard all night because we looked so tired.

The IBM 370 Years

In the mid 1970’s computers started advancing faster and faster. I worked on the IBM 370 series. The main languages were the same as the 360’s but the hardware got faster. No longer did we have the old typewriters to communicate but new screens and keyboards. Also gone were the lights and bells, how boring. Storage was bigger too, a whopping 128K. The data was stored on removable storage units called DASD, (Direct Access Storage Device). They looked like huge records about eighteen inches across and six or eight ‘records’ deep, and weighed about ten pounds each. We became very muscular. Most of the data was kept on magnetic tape.  We had tape vaults with hundreds of tapes in it. If you have ever seen old movies with banks of old six foot reel to reel tape drives, that is what we used.

The Final Years

The final years for me were the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. I was in my forties, the oldest person in my department, and very burned out. By now Bill Gates was going strong. Personal Computers were getting more and more popular in the business world. It still took someone to program them because the users were not interested in computers just the reports that they could produce. Besides, operating the mainframe, I also had to operate and program, to a certain extent, the P.C.s that were still kept in the computer room. They used DOS, not the same as the old DOS, and BASIC for the programming language. The mainframe we had at the time was state of the art. It was the AS400, it was about the size of a refrigerator. It had something that we only had heard about that was the GIGABYTE. Just imagine, 1000 MEG. In fact, our company was the first in Canada to have Gigabytes in a commercial environment. We were the first to have ‘mirroring’ which was the ability to have an exact duplicate of the storage in the CPU. Every transaction was duplicated in the mirroring storage. This was in case of a head crash, which was considered a disaster in the computer world. If a head crash occurred in mirrored storage the machine would simply go to the backup or mirrored data. The user would not be inconvenienced, and we could call for service, and replace the damaged disk drive. You guessed it; we were the first in Canada to have a head crash using mirroring. It saved our butts. In 1992 I had had enough, we moved across Canada. I got into the security business and never missed computers a bit. Now computers with windows and the Internet are so user friendly that anyone off the street can use them with no trouble. I think I got out in time, as my job no longer exists.

The Future

I have seen computers come out of the Stone Age and into the space age. I was a jack-of-all-trades in the old days, now there are specialists for every part of the computer. There are software people, hardware people, network people, web design people and coffee people that keep the rest awake all night when there is a problem. What does the future hold, who knows? I read that the scientists are working on an implant in the head. They already make a blind man see with a visor implanted directly into the brain. I hope these guys are on our side.

Back to the Future

The above was my story of the old days in computers. I was a senior computer operator, scheduler, programmer and production support in a lot of different companies for over 25 years. The technology went ahead so fast over the years that eventually it left us operators and programmers behind. The office workers, called ‘users’, all had P.C.s on their desks and could process their own input data. The old users that used to input their data to our data entry department for processing, and could not learn computers, were all phased out. I feel that I should explain some of the terminology of the day. For example, a ‘Head Crash’ is not a stroke. It is when the head sensor of the disk drive, which floats about a millimeter above the disk that is spinning around sensing the data, touches, or crashes, on the surface of the disk. The disk must be replaced and all the data on it must be restored to the point of the head crash on a replacement disk. Without ‘mirroring’, like the cloud of today, we would have to take all our disks and tapes to a computer room offsite and rebuild the system. Then we would start processing from there until our system was repaired. All this would take days. The company would lose millions of dollars and maybe even shut down. We had an offsite computer room on standby at all times. We would even go there and practice the recovery procedures once a month. Thankfully, when we did have a head crash happened we had mirroring. Actually, it happened to me. I was the only one that noticed it. A message flashed up on the screen like ‘mirroring is activated’. I called my boss, he called the engineers to come in and replace the damaged drive. They did. Then we simply switched the mirroring off and continued with the processing. No one except us in operations knew that we saved the company. We ran ‘JOB’s, which was the combination of the data to be processed, the object program that the programmer created and the JCL (Job Control Language) that we created to tell the program which devices to use and where to put the data on the disks. When I wrote about ‘debuging’ a program, this started with a real bug getting into one of the older computer and causing problems when it ate some of the wiring. When I wrote ‘we would say START’ did not mean that we actually talked to the computer, except to swear at it. We would simply type it into the typewriter to tell the computer to start a ‘JOB’. We would communicate with the computer via the ball typewriter on the first computer that I operated in the early 70’s. I wrote about Grace Hopper. Turns out she was not a relative, too bad; I could have used her brains. She was the first female Rear Admiral in the US Navy. She never went to sea. She worked in the offices developing her computer languages. She invented ASSEMBLER, COBOL, and probably RPG. These were old computer languages that brought computers from wiring panels to writing code so that they could use computers in the business world. This was revolutionary. Now they could code programmes to do transactions 1000 times faster than they could do just filling in paper work. She was the mother of the modern computer. I wrote about ‘GANG PUCHING’. This does not mean a riot. It just means that we would wire a panel to move one field of data from one area on the punch card to another area. I wrote about what I thought the future would hold. Scientists have made huge progress in the medical world with robots doing operations remotely. Computers fly airplanes. The pilots are now computer operators. The smart phones have so much storage that I cannot fathom it, knowing what one byte looks like. I cannot imagine what the next 20 years will bring in computers. I am sure there will be implants in our brains, or elsewhere. If the human race is still around!