Personal and Distributed Computing

Abstract

The first computers were very large and very expensive. The first ‘big’ computer I ever saw in detail was installed in an air-conditioned basement, accessible only through sealed and locked doors. The Data Processing Manager proudly showed us around the installation, indicating several wardrobe-size cabinets and describing how each of them contained 256 KB of ‘core storage’ (RAM). I passed some big cabinets the size of kitchen cupboards. Each contained a disk pack with several stacked 14-inch disks that could each hold ‘over a hundred megabytes’ of data. The mainframe itself was impressively large, with an array of rapidly flashing lights set in a panel in front of the cabinet. At the far end of the room, three huge ‘chain printers’ hammered their way through what looked like the entire paper output of several Finnish forests. The Data Processing Department boasted a staff of twenty people.