Leeds Before Andrew

The man - not the CMU file system

1957

• A truly vintage year

Six Universities purchase computers

Born in1957

• European Union

• Scalextrics

• British Computer Society

Lyons Corner House1957 ??

• Developed LEO computers

• first business use of computers - worldwide

• The only Lyons Corner House outside the London area was in Leeds

Seymour Cray and CDC

• Control Data Corporation was founded by William C. Morris and a group of engineers (amongst whom Seymour Cray) from Sperry Rand

ECMWFCRAY-1

Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)

• founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson.

• PDP-1 computer

FORTRAN-1 is formally published

• John Backus led the IBM team

From the History of Computing Project website

http://www.thocp.net/

• Verbatim:“A first attempt to immitatie human intelligence in a simulacron is attempted by Herbert.”

• No further explanation is offered

Milestones in Leeds

1957 Electronic Computing Laboratory

1957 Pegasus• installed in Eldon Chapel

• Known as Lucifer

Operators’ Manual for Pegasus

Useful operating instructions

KDF9

• 1962? KDF9 installed in Eldon Chapel

• 1965 Flowers Report

• 1966 KDF9 upgraded and moved to Computer Block

1966 First Undergraduates(Combined Studies)

1968 Eldon2 service starts

• 192 Kbytes core store 6S cycle time

• 24 Mbytes hard disk - seek time 300 mS

• PDP-8 communications processor

• 32 teletype terminals

• response OK up to about 26 logged on users

ICL 1906A

• 1972 ICL1906A installed

• 1972 KDF9 switches to student role

• George 3 (later George 4)

THIS IS GEORGE 3 MARK 8.67 ON 31DEC9910.19.03_

TIMED OUT 10.19.33

THE SYSTEM HAS TEMPORARILY CLOSED DOWN

Milestones UCS / ISS

• 1979/12/29 Amdahl V7 with VM/CMS

• 1975 Wells report - JANET - e-mail

• 1984 JANET starts on 1st April

• 1984 upgrade to Amdahl 580

• 1990 UNIX - Sun, SG, HP

• 1990 PCs - DOS

• 1990s UCS/Admin DP merged to form ISS

• 1992 WWW

Students1968 freshers - 40% female

More students1968? - 31.5% female over the 3 pictures

Students socialising

Students socialising

• Not a shrinking violet

• Not lacking in confidence

• Not one to shirk a challenge

• Not afraid of the unconventional

Recollections of Andrew

Algol68 on 1906A

• World’s first Algol68 compiler

• 1970s saw rapid development in programming languages

• Perhaps the first Leeds undergraduate to explore the language

Perhaps the last Leeds undergraduateto work on the machine

Final Year project onAnalogue Computer

Andrew J Herbert