From the left Alan Coombe,Keith Woods,Peter Stocker,John Roper,Frank Charles.
Over a period of 30 years from the mid to late sixties until the turn of the
century these people guided the UEA computing service from it's inception as
a programming shop mainly for scientists to the all embracing IT service it
is today.
Under the Directorship of Peter Stocker the Centre established
an early national reputation with the development of such projects as the
first front end processor system for interactive access to mainframes.
A typical Directors report from this
period illustrates the challenges faced then and in many ways applies equally well today.
The Centre had an excellent programming advisory service led in the late sixties
by ace physicist Ortwin Treutler with Keith Hood and Chris Higley
which as well as running a help desk service also produced user documentation in the form of Programming Notes.
Typical scientific users were found in the NMR Group operating from the Chemical
Physics sector in CHE.
A lot of very good science was done on the original ICL 1905E
machine despite it being an impossibly slow system by todays standards.
Even the faster ATLAS
only ran at 0.5MHz and UEA mainframes never got as far as the first 1MHz 1906A.
Try asking a Dixons
sales person today why you need 3GHz to do word processing !
Annual reports summarised the equipment, usage and progress - here is one for 1975-76
Note the fault reports for the year on just processor/store components at 49 for the 1903T and 126 for the 1905E !