Harris computer system
The days of the proprietary mini-computer. Data General, Prime, Digital, Harris.
This was one of Sunderland Polytechnic's Harris H100 multi-user computer systems, circa 1980, which provided a service for 30 or so students at a time using display screen terminals. Fortran and BASIC were available as programming languages. This machine was in the Priestman Building with maths and computing.
The two boxes on the right are exchangeable disk drives, each with a capacity of 40MB - so in today's terms you would have room for a small handful of photos from Flickr. 1-2 raw files from a full frame DSLR. There is a reel to reel tape deck for loading software upgrades and taking backups. An operating system upgrade typically took all morning and a backup perhaps an hour.
I can't recall the exact model number of this mighty beast, or the CPU clock speed, but I think it had 512K of RAM.
More power in a mobile phone than this lot.
I once lost the supervisor password and had to load a program in binary machine code using the toggle switches on the front panel of the processor, to access the disk and manually patch in a new password. REAL PROGRAMMING!
If you wanted anything doing you pretty much had to write it yourself. In those pre-internet times, copy a file from one computer to another type? Write file transfer send and receive programs on both computers and plug them together.
Harris computer system
The days of the proprietary mini-computer. Data General, Prime, Digital, Harris.
This was one of Sunderland Polytechnic's Harris H100 multi-user computer systems, circa 1980, which provided a service for 30 or so students at a time using display screen terminals. Fortran and BASIC were available as programming languages. This machine was in the Priestman Building with maths and computing.
The two boxes on the right are exchangeable disk drives, each with a capacity of 40MB - so in today's terms you would have room for a small handful of photos from Flickr. 1-2 raw files from a full frame DSLR. There is a reel to reel tape deck for loading software upgrades and taking backups. An operating system upgrade typically took all morning and a backup perhaps an hour.
I can't recall the exact model number of this mighty beast, or the CPU clock speed, but I think it had 512K of RAM.
More power in a mobile phone than this lot.
I once lost the supervisor password and had to load a program in binary machine code using the toggle switches on the front panel of the processor, to access the disk and manually patch in a new password. REAL PROGRAMMING!
If you wanted anything doing you pretty much had to write it yourself. In those pre-internet times, copy a file from one computer to another type? Write file transfer send and receive programs on both computers and plug them together.