THE EARLY YEARS
Anyone that did their schooling in the 1960s will remember with affection or maybe horror, those thick tomes of incomprehensible “Logarithmic Tables” which, when all was said and done, turned the task of multiplication and division into one of addition and subtraction. Kids stuff you might say – as long as you can add and subtract in the first place !!Then there was the good old “Slide Rule” which enabled you to do calculations on a two-piece sliding ruler. Good enough - if you were happy that 2 + 2 came to approximately 4 !!
Computers in the 1970s occupied an enormous amount of space. You may laugh at the banks of computers in the seventies TV shows like “Dr Who”, “Space 1999” and “UFO” but that’s not too far from the truth – just take away most of the flashing lights and the control panel that’s looks like it was taken from the flight-deck of Concorde, and you’re there.
Students attending university in that era had to wait for a pre-booked time-slot on the computer and hope they could get their assignment done in the allotted time. Student computers, as we know them today, just didn't exist. Punched-cards, paper-tape and magnetic tape were the media of the day. Students would fill in coding sheets written in the programming language they were learning (e.g. Fortran, COBOL, Algol), submit them to computer staff, who would then produce a stack of punch-cards (or stream of paper-tape) and feed it into the computer. Just miss out a full-stop or mistype a ‘plus’ as a ‘minus’ and it was a days work or more to go through the procedure again. Strangely enough there were surprisingly few student suicides.