I've used all sorts of computers over the years but only a few were memorable and not always because they were good. Nowadays PCs are soulless tools devoid of any personality but computers in the 60's and 70's had something else, apart from a front panel full of switches and flashing lights ! If you haven't run software on a real computer you haven't run software. Who needs debug software when you can flip the run/stop switch over and debug by watching the lights as you single stepped through the code.

The first computer I ever used was a PDP-8e like this one. It was at Christ's College, Liverpool and was setup almost identically to the PDP-8 in the picture below (though that isn't an 8e.) I wrote a program that read in 5 numbers and printed the average. That was in 1973 when I was just 12. The basic interpreter was loaded from paper tape. The PDP-8e was a 12bit machine with 4kwords of magnetic core. I wrote the program on a school visit to see "The Computer". Most of us were really disappointed when we saw "The Computer" as we were expecting a room full whirring tape drives as popularized by Hollywood's view of computers during the 60's and 70's.

The classic setup, a minicomputer and Teletype ASR-33, a sight repeated in many colleges, universities and labs. The ASR-33 required a fair amount of effort to type on and ran at 110 baud. That permanent printout made using ED and its friends a lot easier than when you ran it on a VDU.
 
 
 

After a few years gap, I got a Saturday job at the newly opened PC shop where I could play all day on the whizzy home computers of the day. We had PETs (spit!) and Apples mainly. But we also sold NASCOMS and Exidy Sorcerers. For some strange reason my school bought a Sorcerer. They were horrible but at least it was there to play with at lunchtime and after school finished. However, in 1979 it was such a prized item that getting access was restricted to those who it was felt would "benefit most". That didn't include me until the staff found out I worked in an Exidy shop. Unlike the photo, we didn't have disks but cassette tape. Cassette tape, cassette tape ! The thought now is just so horrible. At least you could repair paper tape with sellotape and scissors and make it load. Not a real computer in any sense of the word.
 

After school came university, Leeds University. The combined engineering departments (Mechanical, Electrical and Civil) had just taken delivery of a shiny new Prime 750 when I started. We had to program it in Basic but it did have Fortan-77 and Pascal available for the sadists. We were allocated 2 hours of terminal time per fortnight. (I kid you not!) This was obviously insufficient do anything other than the set labs and left now time for playing and general mischief. I soon got adept at "acquiring" other people's login info to get more time. I was caught eventually and threatened with exclusion from the terminal room if I did it again. The operators were seriously analy-retentive, they hid most of the PRIMOS manuals from the undergraduates and did there best to stop anybody actually using the beast. This photo shows a dual processor Prime 850. I couldn't find any pictures of a 750. Probably because most people want to forget them. Prime ASCII to real ASCII anyone ? The Prime 750 was a 1 MIPS machine which is about half the compute speed of my Palm IIIx. We had 2MB of memory on the 750 and my Palm has 4MB. So I can get twice the store at twice the speed in my hand instead of in an air-conditioned room in just 20 years. Frightening.

There were some interesting and much nicer machines around at Leeds. The picture on the left is a PDP-11/45. I can't remember if ours was an 11/44 or 11/45. But the lecturers and post-grads used it aswell as a few digital labs sessions. We ran the godawful  Whitesmiths Z80 cross assembler on it. It ran Unix and if you asked nicely you could use it too outside of the labs. The orange machine is a DECSYSTEM-20 because it runs TOPS-20. Whereas if it was blue it would have been a DECsystem-10 (the case is important). The computing department either had two DECsystem-10s or one DECSYSTEM-20 and I can't remember which. I persuaded some computer science friends to lend me their login info so I could play. The terminal room had a mixture of VDUs and ASR-33 Teletypes and nobody wanted to use the teletypes so you could often get access on one of those. And that orange is in fact "Chinese Red". The PDP-10 was a truly great machine. Even though you can't see any flashing lights. I used another one at Liverpool Polytechnic in 1988 (again I can't remember if it was a 10 or 20). In the eight years since using one at Leeds either PDP-10s had slowed down a lot or PCs had speeded up immensely as it didn't seem to be as impressive anymore. Still, if I had the  space I have one tomorrow along with some washing machine disk drives.

www.36bit.org has interesting information on the PDP-10 here.

Around this time I got my hands on my first real computer, a Data General Nova 1200 like the one above. As a contract games programmer I had house of PCs, Ataris, Amigas etc. but no real computers. The Nova is a real computer because it has flashing lights, front panel switches and a run/stop switch. Mine had 16Kwords of magnetic core, along with 4 logic controlled cassette drives, a paper tape reader/punch and a VDU. The VDU never worked and I couldn't fix even though I had half a ton of manuals. I contented myself with hand assembling programs and toggling them in on the front panel and watching the lights flash. To gain some perspective of just how old the Nova was the front panel lights were 60mA filament bulbs as it predated the manufacture of the LED !  Sadly, mine went to the dump in 1998 as I needed the space in my garage.

In 1989 I started with a company (Shandon) that designed and manufactured histology and cytology machines. They had a disgusting Unix box running Uniplus III+ on a 68000 @ 8MHz. It was not impressive when 6 people were using it. However, they also had a VAX 11/730 running BSD 4.3 doing nothing. It had been inherited when the commercial department upgraded to a VAX 8000 series. We had more of that godawful Whitesmiths junk software on it including their piss-poor 68k C cross compiler. I spent the first few months porting a realtime program that had been developed using the other machines native compiler. I could never understand why they didn't spend the money on getting the cross-assemblers for the VAX which went like the clappers compared to the other machine. By the time they were ready to spend the £10k on new software we bought some Taiwanese PC clones and software instead and had enough change left to but 2 handheld EPROM programmers! I could have had the VAX but its R80 drive was no longer a happy bunny. So it went in the skip. Sigh.

You can find out something out Shandon here and what I did for them here.
 
 
 

This is a Silicon Graphics Indigo2. It's not a real computer but it's not bad. Shandon bought a shedload of these in the mid-90's to handle all the CAD needs of the drawing office. They ran SGI's Irix Unix clone and the most brilliant networked tank battle game. They put the PCs of the day to shame but are probably comparable to a small PII machine in performance. I never wrote any code for these, just played with the games. The software, Irix and ProEngineer, was not particularly stable. The statement "more bugs that a Panamanian swamp" would best describe the state of play when I left in 1998.