Back in those days it was all paper tape input, but you can see the outline architecture of a von Neumann machine, which is filling an entire room.
We had venerable Elliott 803 in my first computer room. It was transistorised but similarly arcane and had paper tape input, along with the 39-bit word (don't ask). It only had 4096 memory cells I seem to remember and needed to be programmed in Autocode. We didn't have mag tape, but it supported 35mm film coated with magnetic material, by Kodak.
Then the Elliott 503 came along with Algol to write Apps and the rest is, as they say, history.
It's worth noting that this heyday of invention was largely from the International Computers Limited ICL stable: Elliott, Marconi, English Electric and Leo (Joe Lyons corner houses). The business-focused part of this group in turn became part of ICL - a 10%-nationalised company formed in 1968 by Harold Wilson's Labour government, whilst the automation parts of Elliott went to GEC - the company which would end up briefly running Dragon Data before the the latter's collapse in 1984.
GEC would eventually end up as part of British Aerospace - BAe Systems, whilst ICL was subsumed by Fujitsu in 1998, although it kept its name until 2002.
ICL (and later Fujitsu) continued to win many government bids with their COBOL-running competitors to IBM's machines- some say it also staved off antitrust.
COBOL has been criticized for its verbosity, design process, and poor support for structured programming. These domain weaknesses resulted in monolithic programs that are hard to comprehend as a whole, despite their local readability. It was designed for clerical programming with forms...
Many said that ICL's new range (2900) was better technology, but IBM had the marketing clout.
In Europe there are IBM buildings adjacent to major German organisations with processing centres. In the UK I can think of Fujitsu across the road from big government processing centres.
No comments:
Post a Comment