Re: Progress in data processing

I have to smile.
I started working in D.P (thats Data Processing to you
whippersnappers) in 1985.
The computer was an old NCR century 100, its was 18 years old & I was
17.
This machine was one of the first to use MOS memory, 256K in all,
though it still had about 4K of boot core memory.
Every job was started with punched cards, we had a 'console' which was
a typewriter keyboard & thermal printer.
Disks were removable disk packs, they had been 'unstrapped' to
increase the storage to 200Mb, there were three, the drives were the
size of wa****ng machines.
Backup was to 1/2inch mag tape at a maximun density of 3200BPI (Bits
per inch) though we ran them at 800BPI for safety.
Out biggest client was a chain of Menswear stores we loaded each days
transactions from there POS registers from cassette tape, about 35 of
them.
In that small system we ran Debtors, Creditors, General Ledger and
Sales Analysis, some clients had stock control.
Though the memory was 256K it was 'partitioned' into 4 so you could
run 4 jobs at once.
Most of the jobs would run in 48K, the OS used up 96K.
It didnt have virtual memory, you could page in code by program
control but it would be too slow to do that per transaction so a
debtors end of month roll really did run in 48K.
The systems were programmed in Cobol, the programs were patched with
patch cards to change clients names & addresses by poked the strings
into memory locations once the program was loaded. There were a only a
few utlities to copy, backup or sort files.
We had a 32K partition where we could run the editor, it drove a dumb
terminal that ran an edlin style line editor.

Makes me wonder what the computers will be like in another 40 years.

Jeremy Thomson