Tuesday 5th August 1980 at 11:45. Still the days of the ICL mainframes. The STATE OF THE SYSTEMS board reads:George 3 Running. Maximop Running. Plotter ( Calcomp ) out waiting for Engineer. Operator Nick Williams talks to Receptionist Una in the old reception area/entrance at the East end of CPC(ITCS). Times advertised for remote job entry service for more powerful systems at Cambridge and Manchester. Note the clock on the wall which has survived multiple system architectures ! Before the online links to Cambridge and Manchester a postal service operated to the Chilton ATLAS or later the 1906A ( Harwell site ). Card decks were posted in special boxes up to 2000 cards in a BOX about 18 inches long (for around 70p postage in 1975). Turnaround time was anything up to 10 days although they did have a service to correct syntax errors in codes (mostly FORTRAN) without posting it back again. ATLAS which cost around 3 million pounds in the mid 1960s had half a megabyte of main store and a processor of about half a MIP ! University researchers would travel from all over the country to spend a few days in residence and take advantage of the huge power available ! I spent a happy week there myself in 1971 trying to debug an NMR program. Here is a typical ATLAS lab Job Request card . The SC4020 device mentioned was a microfilm output camera for graphics and probably very expensive to run !
