Early Computer Systems

My first job was as a “Computer Operator” in a long-gone company called “Computime” in Dublin.

Computime was a “Computer Bureau”: a company with a computer on whom other companies who could not afford a computer would depend for applications like invoicing, debtors, creditors, payroll, etc.

It’s hard to believe in these days of ubiquitous computing that there was a time when successful businesses did not have a computer of their own!

Anyway, when I joined in 1979 they had the following equipment in the computer room:

• An IBM System/3
• An IBM 1403 line printer
• An IBM 3741 diskette reader

I'm pretty sure the System/3 had 4K of memory. Not very impressive when my Apple ][ at home had 16K. But the 1403 printing at full speed was a far cry from the Epson dot matrix printer I had at home!

This picture shows an operator (who doesn’t look as any of us did!) changing a removable disk on a System/3:

The “data prep” staff worked in the next room performing key-to-disk operations using a number of IBM 3742 workstations. Here are pictures of the 3741 and 3742:

Simple, happy days.

Some day I must remember to blog about the day one of the operators pulled the “Emergency Pull” switch on the System/3! Heaven only knows why a computer would have such a switch! Perhaps the designers were thinking ahead to the day when one of their creations would become “self-aware”!