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Ian's
'Naff' Page of Computer Pics!
A page with some pics of 'real' computers, circa 1990
There doesn't seem to be many pictures of mainframe and mini's on the web so I created this page just to show a few pictures I took. It's all a bit rough, as I am doing it on the spur-of-the-moment, but I may do some tidying-up later on!
By pressing the F11 key (Internet Explorer 6 and later/Mozilla Firefox 1.0) you can increase the size of your browser's window - press it again later to return to normal.
NOTE: All the pictures on this page have been adjusted using 'Adobe Photoshop CS' on an 'Adobe Gamma' calibrated monitor set to sRGB (gamma 2.2)
(If you have a slow connection please be patient while the pictures load)
Back in the late 1980's-early 90's, I was a computer operator on Honeywell-Bull (now Bull HN) mainframes and mini's, mostly Level-64 and DPS-7* mainframes, and Level-6 and DPS-6 minicomputers. I was living in Chiswick, West London (UK) at the time. *DPS='Distributed-Processing-System'.
The Level-64 and DPS-7's were 72 bit (64 bit word, plus error correction) small/medium size mainframes, and the Level-6 and DPS-6's were 16 bit minicomputers.
The Level-64 and DPS-7's were running GCOS 7 ('General, Comprehensive, Operative Supervisor') and TDS ('Transaction Driven System' - the equivalent to IBM's 'CICS'). The particular Level-64 I once worked on was also running PM200, an OS2000 emulator - 'stone age' stuff from the 1970's!
Being from a different 'family', the Level-6's and DPS-6's were running GCOS 6 Mod 400 and TPS ('Transaction Processing System') With advances in hardware, Honeywell-Bull updated their computers, the DPS-7 becoming the DPS-7000 and the DPS-6 the DPS-6000, but there was no real difference from an operator's point of view, they all ran their particular version of GCOS.
At one time or another I worked for, or at, the following companies:
Trico Folberth Ltd., (Trico) Great West Road, Brentford, Middlesex. (a Level-64 and a Level-6) Hi Avril, Hi Dave, Hi Chris, Hi Piers, Hi Mike!
At Trico, the computer room looked out on the Great West Road and had large, one-way windows. The floor was hard and after I had oiled the castors on my swivel-chair, at night, when I was entirely on my own, I could zoom up and down the room quite fast. When I had also raised the seat a bit, I found that I could reach up and change tapes without having to get out of my chair! I often wondered what any passers-by thought as they saw me going everywhere 'by chair', because although the windows were supposed to be 'one-way', they only really worked like this during the day - at night, any onlookers would have been able to see in just as well as I could see out.
The Level-64 had a 'crash' alarm that sounded very like one of today's smoke alarms, and I could do a reasonable impression of it. On day shifts, when the mood took me, I would wait for Avril (the Chief Operator) to come into the computer room and then I would move round to behind the CPU (It was MASSIVE) and then do my impression! The look on her face when she thought the machine had crashed, was quite a picture, as a crash would have halted almost the whole factory.
On nights, if by some miracle I had managed to finish running all the scheduled jobs*, I would go home early and walk the two miles back to Chiswick. It was surprising how pleasant (especially in the summer) that quiet early-morning walk home, along the Great West Road, could be. My route took me past the buildings of various companies, such as the small tower block of 'Honeywell-Bull', as well as the glassy 'Wang' building and the empty shell of 'Flyover House'. I can't remember the name of the company that had the building on the corner, right next to Trico - was it Thorn-EMI?
*Usually we were running late due to the machine being run to the limit of it's capacity, i.e. too many jobs to run in the time available, and in addition, the General Ledger (a VERY BIG program that could only be run on it's own) had been changed from a weekly to a daily run and it, alone, took TWO HOURS to complete - ALL batch processing had to be run in the evening or at night, because the factories terminals needed to be online during the day, and the files would be being continuously updated.
I also remember doing double shifts, starting at midnight and working right through until 4 PM, just before I finished at Trico, due to an operator having left and not yet been replaced (the company only had one operator per shift), and after about a week, being so tired as I walked home that I started having hallucinations - I was convinced a tree along the road in the distance was someone walking towards me, but at the same time I still knew that it was a tree! - after this I slept continuously for two days and nights.
Looking back, I liked working at Trico, but with hindsight, I think the extra workload at the end was starting to make me ill. Irregular sleep patterns upset the bodies 'circadian rhythm' and after a while you go to bed and find that you can't sleep, even though you are unbelievably tired.
Just after I left Trico they got the third IBM AS/400 in the country - GREAT career move! - actually, it wasn't that bad a move as I then went contracting (freelance) and overnight DOUBLED my rate of pay!
The 1930's art-deco Trico building was demolished sometime in the 1990's and the company re-located to Wales. - actually, I think it was the other way round - the company re-located to Wales FIRST, and THEN the building was knocked down!
Courage Ltd., Western Avenue, Park Royal. (an ICL something-or-other - I remember it was bright orange!) I was doing a contract there as a Data Controller. No beer.
Rank-Xerox Ltd., Bridge House, Oxford Road, Uxbridge, Middx. (three or four - actually, I think it may have been five - DPS-6's) Hi Dave!
One morning in 1989, at about 2am, we had a bomb scare at Bridge House. Someone had made a phone call claiming a bomb had been planted in the building. We were evacuated (all six or seven of us!) and as we were leaving the building, two squad cars and three police vans full of policemen turned up, together with the Bomb Squad and the Chief Constable of Middlesex - very exciting stuff! - the bomb scare later turned out to be a hoax by someone with a grudge.
The sites main good point was that literally, just a few yards over the bridge from Bridge House, was the 'Crown & Treaty' pub, so named because the peace treaty ending the English Civil War was said to have been signed there. I was at Rank-Xerox when the Berlin Wall came down.
Hoskyns Group Plc. (now Cap Gemini), Regent's Park Data Centre, Centric Close, Camden. (two DPS-7's, facilities management operated for Baring Bros - I know, don't laugh - that was LONG AFTER I LEFT!) Hi Keith, Hi Oz, Hi Richard, Hi Pete, Hi Gary!
When I first started at Hoskyns the Regent's Park Data Centre also had FIVE IBM 3090's (costing £3 million each) - which were later removed, and a couple of DEC VAXes.
I used to get off the tube at Camden Town and walk down Inverness Street and then turn-right round Gloucester Crescent and often see the playwright Johnathan Miller, who lived just round the corner from the RPDC.
At Hoskyns, being right in the centre of Camden, we were just round the corner from some excellent pubs. We used to do 12 hour shifts (8 til 8) and one Friday after finishing at 8 PM, we went to the 'Worlds End' for an after work drink. On the tube on the way home, I managed to get the Northern Line down to Embankment and change to the District Line alright and I can recall getting as far as Earl's Court and then the next thing I remember is waking up at Richmond, at the end of the line. (my stop was Gunnersbury) As I was already on the last train of the night, I ended up having to get a taxi home - not easy to find one at that time of night, wandering around dressed in a suit!
Another pub we used to frequent was ''The Camden Stores' (now called 'The Rat and Parrot') and as at this time the World Cup was on, some of the others would watch the matches in there. Now I come to think about it, just about ALL the other operators I have met have liked their beer!
Bull HN Information Systems (formerly Honeywell-Bull) Hemel Hempstead, Herts. (three DPS-7000's) Hi Rob!
I never really got round to taking many pictures of kit and it was discouraged or forbidden (for security reasons) at most sites.
These are a few I did take and were all taken with a film camera (no 'digitals' then!) - Pictures re-scanned July '04
The photo's below were all taken back in 1989-90, so I don't think the sites concerned will have any objections now!
Back in May 1989 I did a short contract in Bournemouth.
Me, in the computer room, Bournemouth Borough Council, 1989. The two screens that look a bit like ancient PC's are the consoles for the two mainframes - the blue white-topped cabinets behind me are the two DPS-7 CPU's
How about this as a place of work!
The Bournemouth Borough Council building (the Town Hall), 1989 - the computer room was in the basement.
Then in March 1990 I did another contract, this time in Bristol - here's one of the Bristol Water Works' Honeywell-Bull DPS-7
Honeywell-Bull DPS-7 CPU. The blue circular objects in the foreground are 500MB removable disk packs. Note the acoustic coupler (for the modem) on top of the right-hand CPU cabinet. The white object at the extreme right of the CPU is the console hard-copy printer - used to keep a record of all the commands given to and replies from, the computer.
Another view of the same computer room. Note the two tape drives in the background on the left, (one with tape mounted), and the DPS-6 Model 40 'lurking' between them and the two Datanets, (for the Ethernet) obscured by the row of disk drives in front. Black object in the left-foreground is the printer for the DPS-6/40 and behind it to the left, is the grey PR54 main printer.
The same computer room again, with an operator checking the DPS-6's printer - the PR54 main printer is on the right (with it's doors open - note the spare ribbon-cartridges in the door pocket) printing BWW's customer's water bills.
The Bristol Water Works Head Office building, Bedminster Down, Bristol, March 1990, pic taken early in the morning after finishing a night shift.
My DPS-6 Model 40. A Honeywell-Bull engineer friend (Dave Thornley - Hi Dave!) got it for me after it had been re-built almost as new (the chassis was dated 1986, before Honeywell merged with Bull - hence the lack of the 'Bull' name on the front panel) It came from EMI's Hayes, Middlesex site (the record pressing one - at the time, due to the rise of Compact Disc, the last factory in the UK still producing vinyl LP's and 45s) and was being thrown out due to upgrading, - true - I asked them! - bought new they cost around £40,000!
The Model 40 had two 'Lark' hard disk drive units, each with both a fixed 25MB disk and a removable (in a cartridge) 25MB disk, i.e. a total of four 25MB disks, two of which were removable.I had about thirty of these cartridges, totalling 750MB, which was quite a lot of disk space for a home computer back in 1990. If I remember correctly, it also had 4MB of RAM.
As a contrast, the computer I am writing this page on today has an AMD Athlon XP 2500+ 'Barton' CPU, 2.0GB of RAM and an 80GB - i.e. eighty-thousand MB - hard disk.
The Central Processing Unit (CPU) was 16 Bit, and of 'chip-slice' construction, i.e. rather than being a single-chip microprocessor as in today's PC's, it was actually made up of several separate chips that were combined to make up the complete processor.
Although very fast and powerful for a home computer in 1990, it wasn't very fast compared with todays PCs - modern PC users who complain about the time their computer takes to start should compare it with this DPS-6, which took eight minutes to boot-up!
I still have my Honeywell DPS-6 manuals which are as thick as several telephone directories.
Honeywell DPS-6/40. This picture was taken in my last (rather dingy!) Chiswick bed-sit. In winter I used to leave it on when I went down the pub in the evening, and it would warm-up the room for me so that I didn't freeze when I got back (I kept meaning to buy a heater, but I wasn't very well organized at the time) I still have the computer, but it started blowing fuses.
I got interested in computers in 1981 (when I was 19) and built a 'Tangerine Microtan 65' microcomputer from a kit, and taught myself 6502 assembler and BASIC programming on it.
I still have my Microtan
Here's a link to Geoff MacDonald's Microtan 65 site
Microtan enthusiasts can open (or download - right-click & 'Save Target As..') a PDF version of Jim Rew's 1981 'Microtan Companion' here:
Microtan Companion PDF - 4.04 MB
Here's a link to some 'Computer Operator humour' - BOFH - (the B*****d Operator From Hell)
Note: I never did any of this sort of stuff! - well hardly any.
Ian.
Last updated: May 30, 2005
This site was created using Macromedia Dreamweaver MX somewhat incompetently.
© 2003 Gag Helfront