bought its first computer – a gigantic beast that cost millions of rands, weighed more than five tons, and boasted 4.8 whole kilobytes of memory. The ICT 1301 Transistorised Computer was carefully hauled up to the top of the Physics building using a pulley and an I-beam. It was only the second computer ever to be installed at a South African university.
Mike Lawrie was the resident engineer who came as “part of the deal” with the computer. While studying for his BSc part-time, Lawrie kept the 1301 running smoothly, often with two hammers, which he still owns.“If there was a fault, you’d put the wooden side of the one hammer against a circuit board, and you take the other hammer and you go tap-tap-tap, trying to shake up anything loose.”
“But we managed to have fun with them, far more so than other universities where they locked their computers away, and didn’t let students near them,” he added. “I felt the computers were there to be used. Otherwise they’d be obsolete before they were worn out.” Dr Peter Clayton, outgoing Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research at Rhodes University. Image: Chris Marais“Of course, it wasn’t like anyone could just stroll into the computer room. The machine was worth millions of rands. Other institutions wouldn’t allow you in the same room. You might be allowed to look through a window at this hallowed machine.
Computer terminals were cripplingly expensive at the time, but in the late 1970s, Lawrie hunted down some screens in the UK at the fraction of the normal price, and Rhodes University’s team fiddled until they could be made to work.“Gee, the students liked it,” recalled Lawrie. “You could sit in front of a screen, you’ve got some file space on the computer, and it was heaven. This was an advance no other South African university was making available to their students.
Lawrie and his team were thrilled to find that, unlike an IBM or a Univac or a Burroughs, there were no proprietary peripheral issues. Rhodes got lucky when finance company JCI upgraded and donated their lightly used CDC Cyber 825 to the university, for the modest cost of reconfiguring and transport. Professor Justin Jonas, now head of Radio Astronomy Techniques and Technology at the Department, explained:
By then, most South African universities were using IBMs, and they only “spoke” with one another using a protocol called Network Job Entry , which was part of the IBM proprietary Systems Network Architecture. NJE later became the protocol used by BITNET, a precursor to the eventual Internet protocol, TCP/IP, explained Jonas.
Source: Education Headlines (educationheadlines.net)
Great read and some familiar names. Had the great fortune of having had Pat Terry as a lecturer. Didn't realise that this was all happening around the same time.
Still in use at Luthuli House. Coal powered.
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