THE RACE IS ON
From the 1970s to the 1990s, microchip and silicon-based technology raced ahead with computers trying to keep up. Wardrobes full of electronic wizardry shrunk down to the size of bedside cabinets, but memory, speed and capacity were still an unsolved problem. Punch-cards and paper-tape were no longer needed and for the first time students were now able to type their programs directly into the computer through a remote terminal. The computers themselves however, were housed in closely-guarded, air-conditioned, fire and bomb-proof rooms away from curious students.So things were improving. The repeated frustration of having to wait for your job to be submitted and returned until you got it right, was now in your hands. The submitting, running, correcting, re-submitting process could be done in hours instead of days (let’s not get too carried away) and as a natural progression, larger and more complex programs could be written and tested more quickly.
But because of limited memory capacity, the student now had the daunting task of making a program fit into what was available. As programs got more and more complex, a new method was needed to make the most of what memory there was. Thus in the late 1970s the concept of overlays was born, which allowed you to overlay many programs on top of each other, swapping them in and out of memory when necessary. This was a major advancement which stayed with us through the 1980s and into the 1990s.
Today, student laptops and computers today are supercomputers in comparison to the technology available to them two decades ago.