The Panel of Lights
At the risk of giving away my age, not that that is any real secret, I was reminiscing about the time when I started in the field of IT. Eons ago before the venerable desktop but not quite as far back as the punch card or patch board, but never the less far enough. Far enough for me to have witnessed, what was probably the last, Punch Card Operator. For those of you who are wondering, the Punch Card Operator was the person who took your coding sheets, yes we wrote our programs on special paper called coding sheets and in the process wiped out a huge number of forests, and a Punch Card Operator, using a punch card machine, punched holes into a card of approximately 3x6 inches. These cards were then read in by a punch card reader and translated into a stream of characters which could then be viewed on a screen, edited and turned into a computer program if you managed to get it compiled.
I was fortunate enough to skip this era of computing and arrived when monitors and keyboards were being used and, although in the vogue, were expensive and scarce. The monitors took up a desk worth of space and the keyboards were almost as big as a regular typewriter. These monitors could display only green characters and hence the term "green screen". They were merely input devices and contained no computing power whatsoever, well to be honest, just enough computing power to display a set of characters on the screen. In effect they were "dumb" and if you disconnected them from the network they ceased to function.
But the real exciting thing were the machines or more affectionately the computer. It was a hulk of a beast, that required an area the size of a two bedroomed apartment with special air-conditioning systems and a huge supply of water, pumps and radiators to keep it cool and we called it a "mainframe". No you could not have one at home, not even in your garage or basement!
There were tape drives, yes you heard right, tape drives, the thing of sic-fi movies, with two reels, a feeder and a take up reel, and the whole thing used a vacuum system to automatically thread it through the tape reader. A marvel of mechanical engineering. And removable hard disk drives the size of 20 gallon drums that could hold megabytes of data.
I quite clearly remember the day we went to visit the computer room for the first time. We were all excited as we entered the climate controlled environment, kept at a constant 16C. On the left as you entered the door, which was 6 inches of steel and had to be swung open by hand, were the printers with there hammers and chains waiting for the right moment to strike a letter imprinting the paper. They were the size of an industrial stove and literally converted reams and reams of blank paper into neatly printed reports.
Then the disk farm with its hordes of removable disk drives and the tape drives rolling the tape of the feeder reel and onto the take-up reel at an incredible speed. And finally the hulk itself a huge metal cabinet with no discerning features but a switch resembling a huge red light switch. A little way away the console, a screen and keyboard directly wired to the machine, to keep it in check and behind that, what we had all been waiting to see, the light panel.
As witnessed in all the sic-fi movies I had seen before, the light panel full of flickering lights of different colours, mesmerising. I had seen my first computer and, just like the sci-fi movies that I was addicted too, the machine at work in the form of the flickering panel of lights. The entire tour group stood in awe as we watched. I could almost imagine the bits and bytes being processed as the various lights flickered on and off in total randomness. I was in awe.
A few years after this very memorable experience, when I had moved on from being a programmer and moved into the realm of System Programming, my world was shattered when I learned that the unassuming hulk with the big red switch was the computer!
As for the panel of lights, well that was the air-conditioning control unit!
I was fortunate enough to skip this era of computing and arrived when monitors and keyboards were being used and, although in the vogue, were expensive and scarce. The monitors took up a desk worth of space and the keyboards were almost as big as a regular typewriter. These monitors could display only green characters and hence the term "green screen". They were merely input devices and contained no computing power whatsoever, well to be honest, just enough computing power to display a set of characters on the screen. In effect they were "dumb" and if you disconnected them from the network they ceased to function.
But the real exciting thing were the machines or more affectionately the computer. It was a hulk of a beast, that required an area the size of a two bedroomed apartment with special air-conditioning systems and a huge supply of water, pumps and radiators to keep it cool and we called it a "mainframe". No you could not have one at home, not even in your garage or basement!
There were tape drives, yes you heard right, tape drives, the thing of sic-fi movies, with two reels, a feeder and a take up reel, and the whole thing used a vacuum system to automatically thread it through the tape reader. A marvel of mechanical engineering. And removable hard disk drives the size of 20 gallon drums that could hold megabytes of data.
I quite clearly remember the day we went to visit the computer room for the first time. We were all excited as we entered the climate controlled environment, kept at a constant 16C. On the left as you entered the door, which was 6 inches of steel and had to be swung open by hand, were the printers with there hammers and chains waiting for the right moment to strike a letter imprinting the paper. They were the size of an industrial stove and literally converted reams and reams of blank paper into neatly printed reports.
Then the disk farm with its hordes of removable disk drives and the tape drives rolling the tape of the feeder reel and onto the take-up reel at an incredible speed. And finally the hulk itself a huge metal cabinet with no discerning features but a switch resembling a huge red light switch. A little way away the console, a screen and keyboard directly wired to the machine, to keep it in check and behind that, what we had all been waiting to see, the light panel.
As witnessed in all the sic-fi movies I had seen before, the light panel full of flickering lights of different colours, mesmerising. I had seen my first computer and, just like the sci-fi movies that I was addicted too, the machine at work in the form of the flickering panel of lights. The entire tour group stood in awe as we watched. I could almost imagine the bits and bytes being processed as the various lights flickered on and off in total randomness. I was in awe.
A few years after this very memorable experience, when I had moved on from being a programmer and moved into the realm of System Programming, my world was shattered when I learned that the unassuming hulk with the big red switch was the computer!
As for the panel of lights, well that was the air-conditioning control unit!
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