25 YEARS OF COMPUTING

Dr John White

an addendum to his 1989 Annual Report of the Computer Centre

The University of Auckland acquired its first computer, an IBM 1620, in 1963. Four successive replacements have been acquired since, the last being a Silicon Graphics computer installed in the last month of 1989. In real terms, the original computer and the most recent replacement cost the same – about 7 years of a professorial salary – but such has been the pace of technological advance that the new system can complete more arithmetic calculations in 3 minutes than the original computer could perform in a year of continuous running.

THE FIRST SUCCESSOR

The University was quick to develop a full workload of applications for the new resource, and a second computer, the IBM 1130 was operating in parallel with the 1620 a few years later. Greater demand, and a growing recognition of the importance of computing soon made it clear that special funding would be needed if the universities were to use the new technology and make contributions to it on an adequate scale. Government responded to this recognition, and after three years of negotiation, a special grant was awarded for the purchase of Burroughs B6700 computers in five of the New Zealand universities, Auckland's being the largest. It was purchased in 1970, and installed in 1971. The B6700 was a large machine in the style of its time, weighing about 8 tons and drawing over 50 kW of power.

ADDITIONS AND FURTHER SUCCESSORS

The Burroughs B6700 was intended both for batch processing of jobs entered on punched cards and for interactive use through remote terminals, but such was the growth of demand for large-scale computing and data processing tasks that batch work soon took up its full capacity. It was to be about 7 years before the University could install a remote terminal service facility for general users, a Prime P400, purchased in 1977 and supporting 16 terminals. Some of these were grouped in the Computer Centre, and the rest were located (singly) in several locations on the campus.

Only three years later, in 1980, Digital Equipment Ltd made a very generous donation to the University: a DECsystem 10 capable of supporting 38 interactive terminals, and given for exclusive use by undergraduate students. The terminals were established in a large ground floor room of the centre, an area hitherto occupied by the Architecture Library. By 1980, therefore, the Computer Centre was operating three general-access mainframe computers, and this number was to increase further.

Only a year after the DEC-10 came into operation, a further Government grant enabled all the New Zealand universities to replace what had become very obsolete Burroughs B6700 equipment. Auckland installed an IBM 4341, a machine very much larger and more powerful than the B6700, to replace both the B6700 and the Prime. With the 4341 were installed two IBM Series/1 computers for Registry data processing work including accounts, payroll, student records, etc. All of these systems were used only through interactive terminals, and with their installation, the era of the punched card finally passed.

Then about half-way through the decade, the DEC-10 was replaced by two Digital Equipment VAX-750 systems, still reserved primarily for student use, and the Engineering School shortly purchased a further VAX 8250 computer to add to this group. At about this time, too, IBM donated a second IBM 4341 to be installed in the Computer Centre and used for Computer Aided Design in the Engineering School.

AN IBM-UNIVERSITY PARTNERSHIP

At the end of 1987 the University installed an IBM 3081 system in the Computer Centre. It was acquired under a partnership agreement with IBM which resulted in the establishment of the Centre for Information Science. This was a return to large-scale computers comparable in their bulk to the long-gone B6700, and occasioned substantial building changes in the Computer Room. It provided the University with access to computing facilities much more powerful, albeit more limited in the scope of their applicability in the University, than had ever been available hitherto.

MINICOMPUTERS AND MICROCOMPUTERS

From an early stage, computing resources were developing elsewhere in the University as well as in the Computer Centre. By the time the Burroughs B6700 came into operation in 1971, a few departments had already acquired their own smaller, cheaper computers, the first of these being used mainly for the direct control and monitoring of laboratory equipment. During the decade of the B6700's operation, increasing numbers of these "minicomputers" were installed in departments both for laboratory control and for general-purpose computing, and there are probably over 60 operating now.

The first microcomputers appeared in the University about 1978. They were Tandy TRS80 units with 4 Kbyte memories and using domestic cassette recorders as tape drives, and Heathkit H89 units with 32 Kbyte memories and single disk drives. The industry has created a steady, and very rapid succession of more powerful such units, and by now the University has at least 1,500 of them, about 60% being IBM PC-compatible computers and 40% Apple Macintosh. With them came strange new ways of working which by now are commonplace, such as word processing, spreadsheets, database packages, drawing programs and more.

Some of the departmental facilities are now quite extensive, and play an important role in the University's teaching and research. Notable are the very large groups of work-stations supporting tuition in the Computer Science Department and in the Commerce Faculty, and the more dispersed but equally numerous facilities throughout the Engineering School.

SALES OFFICE

The Centre has played its part in this campus-wide development of microcomputers through bulk-purchase dealership agreements with suppliers leading to very substantial purchasing discounts, through technical support, maintenance and repair services, and through network facilities to support microcomputer file transfers.

The Centre's first involvement in bulk purchases of microcomputers came with the establishment of the New Zealand University Macintosh Consortium. This was, in fact, a pilot development from which the Apple Computer Corporation inaugurated an international group of similar organisations. It was based on the Auckland University Computer Centre and handled block purchases for all New Zealand universities as well as the purchase orders from our own departments. At about the same time, the Computer Centre was appointed a licensed dealer in IBM microcomputers - one of the first university computer centres in the world to take such a step - enabling it to supply University departments with these units at substantially reduced cost.

By now the Centre has dealership and discount agreements with a number of suppliers, and during the last year has handled purchases totalling over $3,000,000 on behalf of departments, full-time staff and full-time students.

THE SOFTWARE

Most of the account so far has focussed on the equipment, but the changes wrought in the industry through improving software have also led to great changes in the way the University uses its computing equipment.

For the first seven years, almost all computing tasks were expressed in Fortran, and to be a computer user was necessarily to be a Fortran programmer. With the advent of the Burroughs B6700, a gradually growing number of other languages and some pre-written 'package' programs such as those for statistical analysis and linear programming became available. The languages and packages were not always well suited to a university environment with extremely heavy workloads, however, and over the next few years Computer Centre staff had to write no less than 14 language compilers and several other system facilities in order to make the most effective use possible of the computer's processing capacity. Other departments also created special-purpose packages such as statistical analysis, engineering calculations, etc. It was not until the next decade that the need for such local developments began to wane.

The availability of ready-built application programs which users can buy rather than write for themselves has improved greatly in more recent times, and by now only a minority of computers actually know how to program (and many of those don't bother). Pre-written programs of good quality and covering an extremely wide range of tasks are readily obtainable, particularly for the desk-top microcomputers but also for larger minicomputers and mainframes. Paying for them, through purchases or various forms of rental as appropriate has at times been almost as much a problem in this later era as paying for equipment had been earlier.

THE STUDENTS

Classes in Fortran programming were inaugurated into the curriculum of some courses not long after the first computer was introduced. Students queued along with staff members for card punches to prepare their programs, and could usually hope to have several jobs return per week. However, as classes expanded and more of them were introduced, access to card punches became an impossible limitation. Accordingly, the Computer Centre installed a hand-fed mark-sense reader and wrote several special compilers and batch systems to give a one-hour return for small student jobs. The service was truly awful – unreliable pencil-marked card input at a time when most overseas universities already used terminals – but it is salutary now to reflect that the primitive reader took all of the Centre's capital expenditure allocation ($396) for the year in which it was purchased.

Before long it proved possible to buy improved automatic-feed readers, and with these the mark-sense input system came to handle extremely large numbers of jobs. At peak, the system was finally handling over two tons of cards per week. By the end of 1979, Auckland was providing a form of computing service, albeit a poor one, to many more students than at most New Zealand universities. This success in its turn presented difficulties when better systems had to be provided, since Auckland had to finance replacement facilities on a much larger scale to support many more users than at other institutions. The donation by Digital Equipment Ltd of the DEC-10 system was thus especially opportune and especially welcome.

TUITION

As noted above, some departments were quick to include course segments on Fortran programming in their course curricula, and to support it with locally-written programming manuals and other materials. In time, staff in the Computer Centre and in the Mathematics department began to provide similar course segments at the request of other departments, and by about 1975, Computer Centre staff in particular were giving lecture series on behalf of departments in the Commerce, Architecture, Engineering, Arts, Science and Medical faculties. Over the years since, all of the departments have been able to take over this teaching load themselves.

Auckland University was unable to respond quickly when demand became insistent for tuition in computer science, and the first-degree courses in this subject were given by a team of eight lecturers, four from the Mathematics Department and four from the Computer Centre, as an addition to their other responsibilities. It was late in the 1070s before a Department of Computer Science cold be established formally, and the funding of suitable equipment to support its teaching remained a difficulty long after that. At about the same time, substantial courses in business data processing were established in what was then the Business Studies department of the Commerce faculty, and this aspect of computer tuition has expanded in parallel with the growth of the Computer Science department itself.

By now there can be few departments in which students do not make some use of computers, whether as word processors on which to prepare essays or assignments or as essential tools for studies of some aspect of computers or their use. Increasing numbers of students are encouraged to, or find it useful to buy their own small computers.

THE STAFF

In any review of the growth of computing, attention focuses most naturally on the successive acquisitions of equipment and of the software purchased for it. However, these would have yielded little benefit to the University without the efforts which staff contributed in using the facilities to create services meeting a wide variety of user requirements. Computer Centre staff played a major role in this, but a number of quite notable contributions were made by staff members from other departments, and a few, too, by students. In earlier years, much of this effort went into the writing of fairly large-scale programs such as language compiler, and some into the design and construction of specialist items of ancillary equipment. Modern requirements relate more network and communications systems through which resources in the Computer Centre and the much larger resources dispersed in departments can be used as linked, integrated facilities.

It says much for the calibre of Auckland's staff that all of the developments referred to in this review were brought into effective operation, providing a wide range of services fir consistently very heavy workloads, by an unusually tiny group of support staff.

THE BALANCE OF POWER

The Computer Centre launched University computing with a staff of three, borrowed rooms and a single computer whose capabilities are unimaginably primitive today. It was the University's sole computing resource, and for the next ten years the Centre continued to support over 90% of university computing.

At the end of its first quarter-century the Centre is providing service through 14 computers and 6 operating systems plus an extensive high-speed network involving 4 transmission protocols and their attendant controls. The newest acquisition will shortly replace 6 of the computers and two of the operating systems. Despite this growth, steady expansion elsewhere on the campus has now distributed at least 90% of the University's computing resource to individual desk-tops and small, local multi-computer systems.

Before the current decade passes, taking us into the 21st century, new technology and new resources could well lead to further, equally wide-ranging changes. It is widely anticipated that the requirement for large central mainframe computers will diminish, but less easy to predict a lessening of the need for central databases and file repositories. The importance of the University's data communications network is likely to increase steadily, with growing requirements for more access points, greater transmission bandwidths and more diverse protocols, all of these in turn requiring expanded central facilities for management and control.

When the University began to use computers, few people would have predicted the changes which would occur in the first decade, still less the further and more far-reaching changes which continued beyond that. Computer technology still continues to develop at an unabated pace, and one of the few certainties is that a review ten years hence will record further, substantial and wide-ranging changes in the university's use of that technology.

The Director will welcome further material which others can add to this brief survey of Auckland University's first 25 years of computing.